README

MailWeb

Catch and inspect outgoing emails from your Laravel application in a web dashboard.

MailWeb intercepts emails as they're sent and stores them in your database. You get a dashboard at /mailweb where you can search, filter, preview, and share captured emails, including any attachments.

Requirements

• PHP 8.1+
• Laravel 9.21, 10, 11, 12, or 13

Installation

Install the package:

composer require appoly/mail-web

Run the migrations:

php artisan migrate

Register the routes in your routes/web.php:

Route::mailweb();

That's it. Emails sent by your application will now be captured and available at /mailweb.

Access Control

MailWeb uses a Laravel Gate to control who can access the dashboard. Define the view-mailweb gate in your AppServiceProvider:

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Gate;

public function boot()
{
    Gate::define('view-mailweb', function ($user) {
        return in_array($user->email, [
            'you@example.com',
        ]);
    });
}

All dashboard routes require authentication and this gate check. The only exception is the public share link (/mailweb/share/{id}), which is accessible to anyone if sharing is enabled on that email.

Configuration

Publish the config file if you need to change anything:

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=mailweb-config --force

This creates config/MailWeb.php. Everything can also be set via environment variables:

Attachments

By default, attachment metadata is stored in the database but the files themselves aren't persisted to disk. To keep the actual files, configure a storage disk:

MAILWEB_ATTACHMENTS_DISK=s3
MAILWEB_ATTACHMENTS_PATH=mailweb/attachments

This works with any Laravel filesystem disk. Attachments are stored at {path}/{email_id}/{attachment_id}.{extension}. If the disk supports temporary URLs (like S3), download links will be signed and expire after 30 minutes.

Pruning Old Emails

MailWeb stores up to MAILWEB_LIMIT emails. To clean up older ones automatically, schedule the prune command in routes/console.php:

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Schedule;

Schedule::command('mailweb:prune')->daily();

You can also run it manually with an optional count of how many emails to keep:

php artisan mailweb:prune 50

If no count is provided, it uses the MAILWEB_LIMIT config value.

Dashboard Features

• Search across subject and body content
• Filter by unread status or whether emails have attachments
• Preview HTML, plain text, and raw source for each email
• Share individual emails via a public link with QR code
• Attachments can be previewed (images) or downloaded
• Send test emails using one of five built-in templates to check your setup
• Delete individual emails or all at once (if enabled)
• Polling for new emails in real time
• Settings for date format and pagination preferences (stored in your browser)

Local Development

For local development, you probably want to set your mail driver to log so emails aren't actually sent anywhere:

MAIL_MAILER=log

Emails will still be captured and shown in MailWeb regardless of which mail driver you use.

Working on the Package

If you're contributing to MailWeb itself, symlink it into a test Laravel project:

{
    "repositories": [
        {
            "type": "path",
            "url": "../path/to/mail-web",
            "options": {
                "symlink": true
            }
        }
    ],
    "require": {
        "appoly/mail-web": "@dev"
    }
}

Frontend assets are built with Vite:

npm install
npm run build

Built assets are committed to public/vendor/mailweb/ so end users don't need Node.

Licence

MIT. See LICENSE for details.