How to send email in Laravel 5.1 using SendGrid

Hi Everybody,


Laravel comes with an email sending library built in, so we just need to set it to use SendGrid over SMTP. Check out the docs for Laravel’s mailer for details.

In app/config/mail.php you need to configure these settings:


<?php

return array(
  'driver' => 'smtp',
  'host' => 'smtp.sendgrid.net',
  'port' => 587,
  'from' => array('address' => 'from@example.com', 'name' => 'John Smith'),
  'encryption' => 'tls',
  'username' => 'sendgrid_username',
  'password' => 'sendgrid_password',
);

?>

You can use Laravel’s Mail class just like you normally would, but all email will be sent through SendGrid!


<?php

Mail::send('emails.demo', $data, function($message)
{
    $message->to('jane@example.com', 'Jane Doe')->subject('This is a demo!');
});

?>

Adding a category or custom field

Categories in sendgrid allow you to split your statistics into categories. An example would be if you have a white labeled service you can split your statistics by the user login.

Another useful feature of sendgrid is the notifications. If you want to complete the feedback loop for your product you can pass identifiers as a header which relate to a record in your database which you can then parse the notifications against that record to track deliveries/opens/clicks/bounces.

   

<?php

   Mail::send('emails.view', $data, function ($message)
    {
        $data['category']                  = 'category';
        $data['unique_args']['variable_1'] = 'abc';

        $header = $this->asString($data);

        $message->getSwiftMessage()->getHeaders()->addTextHeader('X-SMTPAPI', $header);

        $message->to('jane@example.com', 'Jane Doe')->subject('This is a demo!');
    });


    private function asJSON($data) // set as private with the expectation of being a class method
    {
        $json = json_encode($data);

        $json = preg_replace('/(["\]}])([,:])(["\[{])/', '$1$2 $3', $json);

        return $json;
    }

    private function asString($data) // set as private with the expectation of being a class method
    {
        $json = $this->asJSON($data);
        $str  = wordwrap($json, 76, "\n   ");

        return $str;
    }
?>

Thanks.