recently I learned about phpmailer and I wonder which one should I use as SMTPSecure, tls or ssl ? According to some articles, https needs a ssl certificate whereas it is written in Wikipedia that ssl has been deprecated.
3 Answers
To be precise SSL (SSLv1, SSLv2 and SSLv3) is dead, technically (hopefully) only TLS is used today.
However people still stick to the term "SSL" even if it is now incorrect. I assume this is because all the non-technical people who learned that SSL means secure. A new term like TLS will just confuse those people.
Conclusion: Nowadays SSL is more or less a synonym of TLS (unless you specify an exact version like SSLv3 or TLSv1.2).
BTW: As far as I know as TLS was developed they decided to change the name from SSLv4 to TLSv1. May be because SSL was a proprietary protocol developed by Netscape and TLS is an open protocol developed by many people under the lead of the IETF.
TLs and SSL both are protocols. SSL is an older version and TLS is a newer version of SSL. Currently, the latest version of TLs is 1.3 which has recently released.
I hope this resource will help you to secure email server.
TLS is the name of newer versions of the SSLprotocol.
But in the case of SMTP (and other protocol) "SSL" means SMTP over TLS while "TLS" means SMTP with the STARTTLS command. See RFC 3207.
Both SSL the protocol and SSL as SMTP over TLS are deprecated.
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