What are the potential risks of modifying third-party libraries like PHPMailer and how can these risks be mitigated?

Modifying third-party libraries like PHPMailer can introduce compatibility issues, security vulnerabilities, and make it difficult to update to newer versions. To mitigate these risks, it is recommended to extend the functionality of the library through subclassing or using composition rather than directly modifying the library code. 

// Example of extending PHPMailer functionality through subclassing

class CustomPHPMailer extends PHPMailer\PHPMailer\PHPMailer {
    public function customMethod() {
        // Add custom functionality here
    }
}

$mail = new CustomPHPMailer();
$mail->customMethod();

Keywords

PHP PHPMailer third-party libraries security vulnerabilities risk mitigation

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