Email Setup

Overview

Mail is configured once for the whole install, in your .env file. Every schedule on the instance sends through that one mail transport. Without a working mail configuration these features do nothing:

SMTP Setup

SMTP is the recommended setup for a selfhosted install: it works with every provider and needs no extra packages. You can point it at your hosting provider's mail server, a mailbox at Gmail or Microsoft 365, or a transactional email service such as Amazon SES, Mailgun or Postmark.

Configure it in four steps

1. Get SMTP credentials from your provider. A host name, a port, a username and a password. Transactional services issue SMTP credentials that are separate from their API keys.
2. Add the variables to .env. Use the block below as a starting point and replace every value.
3. Clear the config cache. Run php artisan config:clear, otherwise the old values keep being used.
4. Send yourself a test message. See Testing below.

Environment Variables

Add these to your .env file:

MAIL_MAILER=smtp
MAIL_HOST=smtp.example.com
MAIL_PORT=587
MAIL_USERNAME=your-email@example.com
MAIL_PASSWORD=your-password
MAIL_ENCRYPTION=tls
MAIL_FROM_ADDRESS=hello@yourdomain.com
MAIL_FROM_NAME="${APP_NAME}"

Variable Reference

Popular SMTP Providers

Here are the settings for commonly used SMTP services:

Other Mail Drivers

Besides SMTP, Event Schedule ships with the mailers listed below. Set the one you want as MAIL_MAILER. Anything not in this table has to be added to config/mail.php yourself, and the app will fail with "Mailer is not defined" until it is.

Sender Configuration

The MAIL_FROM_ADDRESS and MAIL_FROM_NAME determine who emails appear to come from. A fresh install ships with MAIL_FROM_ADDRESS="hello@example.com", a reserved example domain that no receiving server will trust, so change it to an address on a domain you control before you send anything.

MAIL_FROM_ADDRESS=events@yourdomain.com
MAIL_FROM_NAME="My Event Schedule"

One sender for every schedule

On a selfhosted install this is the From identity for all outgoing mail, whichever schedule triggered it. There is no per-schedule sender to configure: the Email Settings tab that lets an owner supply their own SMTP credentials is part of the hosted service and is not rendered when the app runs selfhosted. Pick an address that reads sensibly for every schedule on the instance, and one you can actually receive replies at.

Testing

After configuring your email settings, verify that mail is really being sent. The Send Test Email button in the admin portal belongs to the hosted per-schedule email settings, so on a selfhosted install you test from the command line.

1. Clear the config cache

Laravel caches .env values, so do this first or you will be testing the old configuration:

php artisan config:clear

2. Send a test message

Use Laravel's built-in Artisan command to send a test email:

php artisan tinker --execute="Mail::raw('Test email from Event Schedule', function(\$m) { \$m->to('your@email.com')->subject('Test'); });"

Send it to a real mailbox you can open. Addresses on the reserved test domains (example.com, example.org, example.net, test.com, test.org, test.net) and anything at @localhost are deliberately never emailed by the app's own notifications.

3. Confirm queued mail is being processed

Ticket confirmations, sale alerts and newsletter batches are dispatched as background jobs rather than sent inline. Which means:

• With the default QUEUE_CONNECTION=sync they run immediately, in the same request. Nothing extra is needed.
• With database or redis they wait for a worker. Event Schedule's scheduler runs queue:work --stop-when-empty every minute and retries failed jobs every five minutes, so the schedule:run cron job from the installation guide is what actually drains the mail queue. No cron, no email.
• Scheduled newsletters are also released by that same cron, once a minute.

A real end-to-end check is a free RSVP or a test ticket purchase on one of your own schedules: it exercises the queue, the mailable and the sender address together.

Troubleshooting