Staging and QA

Run Mailroom on a shared staging environment, so testers read every email in the browser without a third-party catcher.

Mailroom is as useful on a shared staging environment as it is on your laptop. Testers get a mailbox they can read in the browser: no third-party catcher to sign up for, no inbox credentials to share around, and the mail stays inside your own infrastructure. The one exception is the spam check, which is off unless you turn it on, and even then sends a message only when somebody clicks.

Captured mail stays captured, so your staging fixtures can use whatever addresses make the test realistic.

MAIL_MAILER=mailroom
MAILROOM_ENABLED=true
MAILROOM_DISK=<your object storage disk>

Three things to get right:

Enable it explicitly. Most staging platforms, Laravel Cloud and Forge and Heroku-style hosts among them, set APP_ENV=production even when the environment is really staging, and Mailroom stays off in production unless you say otherwise. That default is deliberate: see Production.

Put it behind your login. The mailbox holds the full contents of every email your app sends, password reset links included. On anything reachable from the internet, add auth to the middleware stack and gate it:

'middleware' => ['web', 'auth', Authorize::class],

Gate::define('viewMailroom', fn (?User $user) => $user?->isQaTeam());

Point the disk at persistent storage. Staging platforms usually run ephemeral, multi-replica filesystems, where the default local disk loses attachments between deploys and between replicas. Laravel Cloud and other ephemeral platforms covers this.

Add MAILROOM_FORWARD_MAILER and testers can also send a message to their own inbox when they want to check it in a real client. See Forwarding a message.

Set a short prune.retention_days while you are there, so a long-lived staging box does not accumulate months of real-looking personal data.