Laravel provides a clean, simple API over the popular SwiftMailer library. The mail configuration file is app/config/mail.php, and contains options allowing you to change your SMTP host, port, and credentials, as well as set a global from address for all messages delivered by the library. You may use any SMTP server you wish. If you wish to use the PHP mail function to send mail, you may change the driver to mail in the configuration file. A sendmail driver is also available.
Laravel also includes drivers for the Mailgun and Mandrill HTTP APIs. These APIs are often simpler and quicker than the SMTP servers. Both of these drivers require that the Guzzle 4 HTTP library be installed into your application. You can add Guzzle 4 to your project by adding the following line to your composer.json file:
"guzzlehttp/guzzle": "~4.0"
To use the Mailgun driver, set the driver option to mailgun in your app/config/mail.php configuration file. Next, create an app/config/services.php configuration file if one does not already exist for your project. Verify that it contains the following options:
'mailgun' => array(
'domain' => 'your-mailgun-domain',
'secret' => 'your-mailgun-key',
),
To use the Mandrill driver, set the driver option to mandrill in your app/config/mail.php configuration file. Next, create an app/config/services.php configuration file if one does not already exist for your project. Verify that it contains the following options:
'mandrill' => array(
'secret' => 'your-mandrill-key',
),
If the driver option of your app/config/mail.php configuration file is set to log, all e-mails will be written to your log files, and will not actually be sent to any of the recipients. This is primarily useful for quick, local debugging and content verification.
The Mail::send method may be used to send an e-mail message:
Mail::send('emails.welcome', array('key' => 'value'), function($message)
{
$message->to('[email protected]', 'John Smith')->subject('Welcome!');
});
The first argument passed to the send method is the name of the view that should be used as the e-mail body. The second is the data to be passed to the view, often as an associative array where the data items are available to the view by $key. The third is a Closure allowing you to specify various options on the e-mail message.
Note: A
$messagevariable is always passed to e-mail views, and allows the inline embedding of attachments. So, it is best to avoid passing amessagevariable in your view payload.
You may also specify a plain text view to use in addition to an HTML view:
Mail::send(array('html.view', 'text.view'), $data, $callback);
Or, you may specify only one type of view using the html or text keys:
Mail::send(array('text' => 'view'), $data, $callback);
You may specify other options on the e-mail message such as any carbon copies or attachments as well:
Mail::send('emails.welcome', $data, function($message)
{
$message->from('[email protected]', 'Laravel');
$message->to('[email protected]')->cc('[email protected]');
$message->attach($pathToFile);
});
When attaching files to a message, you may also specify a MIME type and / or a display name:
$message->attach($pathToFile, array('as' => $display, 'mime' => $mime));
Note: The message instance passed to a
Mail::sendClosure extends the SwiftMailer message class, allowing you to call any method on that class to build your e-mail messages.
Embedding inline images into your e-mails is typically cumbersome; however, Laravel provides a convenient way to attach images to your e-mails and retrieving the appropriate CID.
<body>
Here is an image:
<img src="<?php echo $message->embed($pathToFile); ?>">
</body>
<body>
Here is an image from raw data:
<img src="<?php echo $message->embedData($data, $name); ?>">
</body>
Note that the $message variable is always passed to e-mail views by the Mail class.
Since sending e-mail messages can drastically lengthen the response time of your application, many developers choose to queue e-mail messages for background sending. Laravel makes this easy using its built-in unified queue API. To queue a mail message, simply use the queue method on the Mail class:
Mail::queue('emails.welcome', $data, function($message)
{
$message->to('[email protected]', 'John Smith')->subject('Welcome!');
});
You may also specify the number of seconds you wish to delay the sending of the mail message using the later method:
Mail::later(5, 'emails.welcome', $data, function($message)
{
$message->to('[email protected]', 'John Smith')->subject('Welcome!');
});
If you wish to specify a specific queue or "tube" on which to push the message, you may do so using the queueOn and laterOn methods:
Mail::queueOn('queue-name', 'emails.welcome', $data, function($message)
{
$message->to('[email protected]', 'John Smith')->subject('Welcome!');
});
When developing an application that sends e-mail, it's usually desirable to disable the sending of messages from your local or development environment. To do so, you may either call the Mail::pretend method, or set the pretend option in the app/config/mail.php configuration file to true. When the mailer is in pretend mode, messages will be written to your application's log files instead of being sent to the recipient.
Mail::pretend();