Laravel Mail Preview / Local Email Inbox Driver

Forked from Laravel Mail Preview.

This package introduces a new preview and local mail driver for Laravel that when selected will render the content of the sent email and save it as both .html and .eml files.

Installation

Begin by installing the package through Composer. Run the following command in your terminal:

composer require se468/laravel-mail-preview

Then publish the config file:

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Themsaid\MailPreview\MailPreviewServiceProvider"

Finally, change MAIL_DRIVER to preview or local in your .env file:

MAIL_DRIVER=preview

or 

MAIL_DRIVER=local

Run

php artisan migrate

and

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=public --force

How it works

Mail Preview

Everytime an email is sent, an .html and .eml file will be generated in storage/email-previews with a name that includes the first recipient and the subject:

1457904864_jack_at_gmail_com_invoice_000234.html
1457904864_jack_at_gmail_com_invoice_000234.eml

You can open the .html file in a web browser, or open the .eml file in your default email client to have a realistic look at the final output.

Local Email Storage

If you are using local for the MAIL_DRIVER, you can go to /email-previews route to see all the emails that has been stored. It will create a local inbox where you can see and preview the emails that's sent out.

Preview in a web browser

When you open the .html file in a web browser you'll be able to see how your email will look, however there might be some differences that varies from one email client to another.

At the beginning of the generated file you'll find an HTML comment with all the message info:

<!--
From:{"[email protected]":"Acme HQ"},
to:{"[email protected]":"Jack Black"},
reply-to:{"[email protected]"},
cc:[{"[email protected]":"Acme Finance"}, {"[email protected]":"Acme Management"}],
bcc:null,
subject:Invoice #000234
-->

Package Configurations

From the config/mailpreview.php file you'll be able to change the output location of the preview files as well as the maximum lifetime for keeping previews, after this time old previews will get removed.

Logged out after clicked on the preview link

You will always lose your current session if you click on the generated notification link. This is because Laravel stores the session in an encrypted cookie. To change this behavior, you have to adjust the middleware property in the config/mailpreview.php file to match the following snippet:

    'middleware' => [
        \App\Http\Middleware\EncryptCookies::class,
    ],