Sometimes we don't want our Laravel application to send email to customers. Here are some tricks to control email sending.
This technique is available starting in Laravel version 8.0.
Laravel allows you to set the application to always send to a specific address. You may want to set this for any non-production environment.
This is done via Mail::alwaysTo(). To use it, add the following to the app/Providers/AppServiceProvider.php class:
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Mail;
// later, within the AppServiceProvider class...
public function boot() {
// If we're not production or staging, use a fake address
if (! $this->app->environment('production', 'staging')) {
Mail::alwaysTo('[email protected]');
}
}
It's generally safe to send test emails to the @example.org domain. It actually exists for this purpose. That being said, don't go sending confidential information there. Of course, you can set the target address to anything you want. Use a configuration variable connected to an environment variable for this so you set the target address in the .env file.
Note: there is also an alwaysFrom() function available.
There's a mail driver you can use that stops Laravel from sending emails. Instead, it will log emails out to your set log channel (the laravel.log file by default).
This can be done by setting environment variable MAIL_MAILER to log.
The log driver is available starting in Laravel version 8.0.
In your .env file:
MAIL_MAILER=log
If you need more advanced features (inspecting the emails being sent, storing them, etc.) there are some services you can use. For example: Mailhog can be installed locally (or on some servers) and be used with the smtp mail driver.
There is a Mailhog plugin in Lando for local development.
You can add Mailhog to you Lando app by adding an entry. to the services top level config in your Landofile.
services:
mail:
type: mailhog
hogfrom:
- appserver
See the Lando documentation for more details.
To be investigated: installing Mailhog at Media3.