E-commerce question

i’m using the oscommerce shopping cart for a client, but the client wants to physically process the credit card himself, instead of via paypal, authorize, etc. so i figure it would be easiest/most automated to send the information from the cart to an email address, stored locally on the server. I’ve purchased SSL and a dedicated ip, but after some research it seems that data sent via email is not protected by SSL. This information sent is obviously very sensitive and must be secure. Can anyone confirm this? if its true, what would be the best way to accomplish this?