Easily Test Email with MailThief

MailThief is a new package by Tighten Co. that provides a fake mailer for your Laravel application. This makes it easy to test email without actually sending any.

To better explain how this package works take a look at the following example from the project.

First, pretend you have a registration route that sends the user a welcome email:

Route::post('register', function () {
    // <snip> Validation, create account, etc. </snip>

    Mail::send('emails.welcome', [], function ($m) {
        $email = request('email');
        $m->to($email),
        $m->subject('Welcome to my app!');
        $m->from('noreply@example.com');
        $m->bcc('notifications@example.com');
    });

    // <snip> Return response </snip>
});

Typically testing this would be pretty difficult, but with MailThief it’s simple:

use MailThief\Facades\MailThief;

class RegistrationTest extends TestCase
{
    public function test_new_users_are_sent_a_welcome_email()
    {
        // Block and intercept outgoing mail, important!
        MailThief::hijack();

        $this->post('register', [
            'name' => 'John Doe',
            'email' => 'john@example.com',
            'password' => 'secret',
        ]);

        // Check that an email was sent to this email address
        $this->assertTrue(MailThief::hasMessageFor('john@example.com'));

        // BCC addresses are included too
        $this->assertTrue(MailThief::hasMessageFor('notifications@example.com'));

        // Make sure the email has the correct subject
        $this->assertEquals('Welcome to my app!', MailThief::lastMessage()->subject);

        // Make sure the email was sent from the correct address
        // (`from` can be a list, so we return it as a collection)
        $this->assertEquals('noreply@example.com', MailThief::lastMessage()->from->first());
    }
}

You can grab the package from Github and if you’d like to learn more about the thought process behind building MailThief check out this post and video by Adam Wathan.