Encrypting personal information

Mailcoach supports encrypting personal information of subscribers through CipherSweet. You can enable this in the config file:

// config/mailcoach.php
'encryption' => [
    'enabled' => true,
    'key' => env('MAILCOACH_ENCRYPTION_KEY', env('APP_KEY')),
]

By default the APP_KEY is used, but you can set a separate MAILCOACH_ENCRYPTION_KEY environment variable.

To generate a new key, you can use the following command:

php artisan ciphersweet:generate-key

After you’ve changed the configuration, publish the CipherSweet migration and migrate the database:

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=ciphersweet-migrations
php artisan migrate

This will create the blind_indexes table that’s needed to support searching and retrieving the subscribers.

Next, change the email, first_name and last_name columns to be text instead of string

Schema::table('mailcoach_subscribers', function (Blueprint $table): void {
    $table->text('email')->change();
    $table->text('first_name')->nullable()->change();
    $table->text('last_name')->nullable()->change();
});

As a last step, you’ll need to encrypt any existing subscribers, you can do this by calling the following Artisan command:

php artisan ciphersweet:encrypt \\Spatie\\Mailcoach\\Domain\\Audience\\Models\\Subscriber <your-encryption-key>

This can take a while, as encryption is a resource-intensive operation, the command can be restarted at any time and will only encrypt the rows that still need to be encrypted.