Tip for Laravel Mail Not Sending Using PHP Mail

If you are having trouble sending email with Laravel and PHP’s mail(), try these steps on your development or staging server.

Laravel Config

Make sure your /config/mail.php file is looking to your .env file for mail configuration, and set up the following parameters:

MAIL_DRIVER=mail
MAIL_HOST=null
MAIL_PORT=null
MAIL_USERNAME=null
MAIL_PASSWORD=null
MAIL_ENCRYPTION=null

The Problematic Code

Do you have something like this?

Mail::send('emails.my_message', $data, function($message){
    $message->to(Request::input('email'))->subject('My Subject');
});

Your email may not be delivered and it may be failing silently.

Try This in Your Controller or Model Code

Laravel’s Mail::send() will return false if the email was not sent, and we will get more information by using Mail::failures().

$result = Mail::send('emails.my_message', $data, function($message){
    $message->from('noreply@mydomain.com', 'My Website');
    $message->to(Request::input('email'))->subject('My Subject');
});

// Laravel tells us exactly what email addresses failed, let's send back the first
$fail = Mail::failures();
if(!empty($fail)) throw new \Exception('Could not send message to '.$fail[0]);

if(empty($result)) throw new \Exception('Email could not be sent.');

// Now do what you do

In addition to adding some checks to ensure the result of the Mail::send() actually worked, it seems to be very important to add in the From address line. Make sure the line

$message->from('noreply@mydomain.com', 'My Website');

is present and see if that does not fix the problem. This also seems to work for Mail::raw().

Last updated on November 3rd, 2015