MailLens

MailLens catches the email your app sends while you are developing, so you can read it in the browser instead of wiring up a real inbox. Set one env variable and every message your Laravel app tries to send gets saved and shown at /mail. There is nothing to install outside Composer, no Docker, and no SMTP catcher running in the background.

If you have used Mailtrap or Mailpit before, it is the same idea, except it lives inside your own app.

Requirements

• PHP 8.1 or newer
• Laravel 10, 11, 12, or 13

Install

composer require hexters/maillens --dev

Run the migration to create the table MailLens stores mail in:

php artisan migrate

Then point the mailer at MailLens in your .env:

MAIL_MAILER=lens

Now send mail the way you normally would and open /mail to read it. You do not need to touch config/mail.php; MailLens adds the lens mailer for you.

How it works

Setting MAIL_MAILER=lens sends your mail through a transport that stores the message instead of delivering it. It keeps the subject, the sender and recipients, the HTML and text bodies, any attachments, and the raw source. The /mail page puts the message list on one side and the selected message on the other, with tabs for HTML, plain text, and source, plus links to download any attachments.

Queued mail

MailLens only changes where your mail ends up, not how your queue works. If a mailable is queued (ShouldQueue, Mail::queue(), or a queued notification), it shows up in /mail after the queue runs the job, the same as it would before a real send:

• QUEUE_CONNECTION=database: run a worker with php artisan queue:work
• QUEUE_CONNECTION=redis: run your worker, or Horizon if that is your setup
• QUEUE_CONNECTION=sync: nothing to run, the mail is captured right away

So if a queued email never shows up, check that a worker is running before you blame MailLens.

Turning it off

There is no separate switch. MAIL_MAILER is the switch. When it is set to anything other than lens, MailLens stays quiet: it does not register the /mail route and nothing routes through it. Keep MAIL_MAILER=lens out of your production .env and your mail will send for real there.

Password protection

By default /mail is open, which is fine on your own machine. If the inbox lives somewhere other people can reach, such as a shared staging server, set a password and MailLens asks for it before showing anything:

MAILLENS_PASSWORD=some-secret

Leave it unset and there is no lock screen.

Configuration

Most people never need this, but you can publish the config file to change the defaults:

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=maillens-config

MAILLENS_PASSWORD=            # protect /mail with a password (unset = open)
MAILLENS_ROUTE_PREFIX=mail    # the inbox lives here
MAILLENS_LIMIT=200            # how many messages to keep (null keeps all of them)

Captured mail is saved on your app's default database connection.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome. Have a look at CONTRIBUTING.md first.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.