JSON environnement variable is seen as a string

I'm trying to help a friend about his nodejs application. He use NodeMailer to send emails automatically. We both use ubuntu.

To avoid any leaks, the credential for NodeMailer are set as an environnement variable called EMAIL_CREDENTIALS.

In the app, EMAIL_CREDENTIAL is called as follow:

 var emailCredentials = process.env.EMAIL_CREDENTIALS;
 if (emailCredentials === 'undefined') {
   throw Error('Email credentials are not present');
 }
 // create reusable transporter object using the default SMTP transport
 var transporter = nodemailer.createTransport(emailCredentials);

To set email credential I added a line in src/environnement :

 EMAIL_CREDENTIALS={host:"smtp.gmail.com", port: 587, secure: false, auth: {user: "**user**", pass: "**pass**"}}

When I run some test, NodeMailer return the following error

 Error: Unsupported configuration, downgrade Nodemailer to v0.7.1 to use it
     at Nodemailer.sendMail (/home/**path**/node_modules/nodemailer/lib/nodemailer.js:274:18)

This error happen because type of param === 'string' in nodemailer.createTransport(param) .

My friend has been using this code for a pretty long time with no problem.

Somehow, I understand where the error come from but I would like to know how is it possible that the environnement variable of my friends setup isn't a string and mine is ? And how should I set my variable to be able to run his code without modifying it ?

via Sylvain