What are common pitfalls when generating emails with PHP that contain data from a MySQL database?

One common pitfall when generating emails with PHP that contain data from a MySQL database is not properly sanitizing the data before including it in the email content, which can lead to security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection attacks. To solve this issue, always use prepared statements or parameterized queries to retrieve data from the database and sanitize any user input before including it in the email. 

// Retrieve data from MySQL database using prepared statements
$stmt = $pdo->prepare("SELECT name, email FROM users WHERE id = :id");
$stmt->bindParam(':id', $userId, PDO::PARAM_INT);
$stmt->execute();
$user = $stmt->fetch();

// Sanitize data before including it in the email content
$name = htmlspecialchars($user['name']);
$email = filter_var($user['email'], FILTER_SANITIZE_EMAIL);

// Generate email content
$subject = "Hello, $name!";
$message = "Your email address is $email. Thank you for using our service.";

// Send email
// (code to send email goes here)

Keywords

MySQL PHP email generation data retrieval security vulnerabilities

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