README

A beautiful, self-hosted email testing driver & dashboard for Laravel — ideal for staging environments.

Laravel Email Sandbox allows you to easily intercept, capture, and preview outgoing emails inside your application without sending real emails to your users. It comes with a stunning, highly responsive dashboard deeply inspired by Mailpit—built natively for Laravel with zero NPM dependencies.

Instead of paying for a hosted inbox (like Mailtrap) or installing extra software (like Mailpit) on your staging server, this package captures every outgoing email straight into your own database and renders it in a built-in dashboard.

📋 Requirements

PHP 8.1 or higher
Laravel 10.x, 11.x, or 12.x

✨ Key Features

Mailpit-Inspired Interface: Beautiful, responsive UI built with Tailwind CSS & Alpine.js (via CDN, no build step required).
Comprehensive Email Previews: Preview emails in HTML, Text, and HTML Source formats.
Responsive Previews: Interactive device toggles (Desktop, Tablet, Mobile) to test your email's responsiveness instantly.
Raw .eml Snapshotting: Captures and stores the exact raw network string (Multipart MIME) for low-level debugging.
Advanced Filtering: Instantly search your inbox by Subject, Body, Sender, Recipient, or Date Ranges.
Detailed Headers: View completely parsed Message-ID, Date, Mime-Version, and all exact headers just like they were sent.
Attachment Support: Safely capture, list, and download all email attachments natively.
Mass Deletion: Keep your database clean with "Delete All" functionality.
Secure by Default: Uses Laravel auth & Gates to ensure only authorized admins can access the dashboard outside of local.

📸 Screenshots

Inbox

Email Preview (HTML / Text / Headers / Raw)

🚀 Installation

Require the package via Composer:

composer require rnsharma93/laravel-email-sandbox

Publish the configuration file (optional — sensible defaults are used otherwise):

php artisan vendor:publish --tag="email-sandbox-config"

The package migrations are loaded automatically. Run them to create the email_messages table:

php artisan migrate

📨 Usage

To start capturing outgoing emails, open your .env file and change your mail transport driver to email-sandbox:

MAIL_MAILER=email-sandbox

Now, any email sent by Laravel will be intercepted and stored in your database & local storage instead of actually being delivered.

You can view all captured emails by navigating to: 👉 http://your-app.test/email-sandbox

Warning

This driver never delivers real email. Use it on local and staging only. If you set MAIL_MAILER=email-sandbox in production, your real outgoing emails will be silently captured instead of sent to your users.

Capturing only some emails

If you'd rather keep your default mailer untouched and only route specific messages to the sandbox, send them through the email-sandbox mailer explicitly:

Mail::mailer('email-sandbox')->to($user)->send(new OrderShipped($order));

🔐 Access Control & Security

By default, the Email Sandbox UI is fully accessible in the local environment.

However, if you deploy this to production, staging, or testing environments, the route is completely locked down by default. To authorize specific users to view the dashboard in non-local environments, you must define the accessEmailSandbox Gate in your application's App\Providers\AppServiceProvider:

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Gate;

public function boot(): void
{
    Gate::define('accessEmailSandbox', function ($user) {
        // Return true if the user is an admin or authorized to view intercepted emails
        return in_array($user->email, [
            'admin@yourdomain.com',
        ]);
    });
}

🧰 Configuration

After publishing the config file, you can adjust the following options in config/email-sandbox.php:

// config/email-sandbox.php
return [
    // The URL prefix where the dashboard is served, e.g. /email-sandbox
    'route_prefix' => 'email-sandbox',

    // Where raw .eml snapshots and attachments are stored on disk
    'storage_path' => storage_path('app/email-sandbox'),
];

Option	Default	Description
`route_prefix`	`email-sandbox`	URL prefix for the dashboard routes.
`storage_path`	`storage/app/email-sandbox`	Disk location for raw `.eml` snapshots and email attachments.

👨‍💻 Developed By

Ram Sharma

GitHub: @rnsharma93
Email: rns6393@gmail.com

If you find this package helpful in your day-to-day development and testing workflow, please consider starring the repository on GitHub!

📜 License & Open Source

The Laravel Email Sandbox package is open-source software licensed under the MIT license.

You are completely free to use, modify, and distribute this package in both personal and commercial projects. Contributions, issues, and feature requests are always welcome! Feel free to check the issues page if you want to contribute.

rnsharma93 / laravel-email-sandbox

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