Production Sending with Mailtrap

Alrighty, it's finally time send real emails in production!

Mailer Transports

Mailer comes with various ways to send emails, called "transports". This smtp one is what we're using for our Mailtrap testing. We could set up our own SMTP server to send emails... but... that's complex, and you need to do a lot of things to make sure your emails don't get marked as spam. Boo.

3rd-Party Transports

I highly, highly recommend using a 3rd-party email service. These handle all these complexities for you and Mailer provides bridges to many of these to make setup a breeze.

Mailtrap Bridge

We're using Mailtrap for testing but Mailtrap also has production sending capabilities! Fantabulous! It even has an official bridge!

At your terminal, install it with:

composer require symfony/mailtrap-mailer

After this is installed, check your IDE. In .env, the recipe added some MAILER_DSN stubs. We can get the real DSN values from Mailtrap, but first, we need to do some setup.

Sending Domain

Over in Mailtrap, we need to set up a "sending domain". This configures a domain you own to allow Mailtrap to properly send emails on its behalf.

Our lawyers are still negotiating the purchase of universal-travel.com, so for now, I'm using a personal domain I own: zenstruck.com. Add your domain here.

Once added, you'll be on this "Domain Verification" page. This is super important but Mailtrap makes it easy. Just follow the instructions until you get this green checkmark. Basically, you'll need to add a bunch of specific DNS records to your domain. DKIM, which verifies emails sent from your domain, and SPF, which authorizes Mailtrap to send emails on your domain's behalf are the most important. Mailtrap provides great documentation on these if you want to dig deeper on how exactly these work. But basically, we're telling the world that Mailtrap is allowed to send emails on our behalf.

Once you have the green checkmark, click "Integrations" then "Integrate" under the "Transaction Stream" section.

We can now decide between using SMTP or API. I'll use the API, but either works. And hey! This looks familiar: like with Mailtrap testing, choose PHP, then Symfony. This is the MAILER_DSN we need! Copy it and jump over to your editor.

This is a sensitive environment variable, so add it to .env.local to avoid committing it to git. Comment out the Mailtrap testing DSN and paste below. I'll remove this comment because we like to keep life tidy.

Almost ready! Remember, we can only send emails in production from the domain we configured. In my case, zenstruck.com. Open config/services.yaml and update the global_from_email to your domain.

Let's see if this works! In your app, book a trip. This time use a real email address. I'll set the name to Kevin and I'll use my personal email: kevin@symfonycasts.com. As much as I love you and space travel, put your own email here to avoid spamming me. Choose a date and book!

We're on the booking confirmation page, that's a good sign! Now, check your personal email. I'll go to mine and wait... refresh... here it is! If I click it, this is exactly what we expect! The image, attachment, everything is here!

Next, let's see how we can track sent emails with Mailtrap plus add tags and metadata to improve that tracking!