How to Send Emails in Laravel (2026)
Laravel Mail is the canonical interface. Providers with a maintained transport beat raw SDK use.
Queues and Mailables are the standard pattern. Most providers ship a Symfony Mailer transport that Laravel composes.
Send patterns
- Mailable classes with markdown or blade templates.
- Queueable Mailables for async sends.
- Notification channels for transactional flows.
- Webhook controllers verifying provider signatures.
Common mistakes
- Forgetting ShouldQueue on Mailables in production.
- Mailtrap-style local config left enabled in staging.
- Webhook signature checks skipped because the route is unauthenticated.
provider picks for Laravel
- 01
Postmark
TransactionalMaintained Laravel transport.
100/mo developer plan · $15/mo for 10,000 emails - 02
Mailgun
TransactionalFirst-class Laravel transport.
100/day permanent free plan · $15/mo for 10,000 emails (Basic) - 03
SendGrid
Transactional MarketingStable transport and queue compatibility.
60-day free trial only (permanent free tier was removed May 2025) · $19.95/mo for 50,000 emails - 04
Amazon SES
TransactionalNative SES driver in Laravel.
Up to $200 in AWS Free Tier credits for new accounts · $0.10 per 1,000 emails
reading this as early-stage startups
At an early stage the deciding factors are what the free tier actually covers, what the first paid invoice looks like, and how much of a founding engineer's week the setup costs. Feature depth that only matters at a million sends a month is noise until it is not.
Applied to how to send emails in laravel (2026), that means weighing free tier, best published rate per 1,000, entry price, and developer experience ahead of the rest, against a waitlist, a launch announcement, onboarding email, and the first transactional sends.