Send email with Amazon AWS SES in Laravel 8/9

Sending emails using Laravel is quite easy. All you need to do is to configure your MAILER service properly. In this simple tutorial I am going to show you two methods to configure your Laravel application to send emails with Amazon AWS SES (Simple Emailing Service).

Prerequisites

1. A working Laravel Applicaiton
2. A working set of AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID & AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY parameters. These parameters are required to send email via SES.
   Note: The same set of access key id and secret access key can also be used for sending email via Amazon SMPT
3. Mailing Writables as explained in the Laravel documentation

Steps to configure Laravel Application to Send Email with Amazon AWS SES in Laravel

Method 1 – Configure SES as Mailer

• Open and edit your .env file which is found in the root folder of your Laravel Application
• Add or update your MAIL_MAILER settings, to look like the following

  MAIL_MAILER=ses

  Add the following settings to .env as well

  AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
  AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

  Hint: You can remove all other MAIL specific settings such as MAIL_HOST, MAIL_PORT etc from .env file.

• Open config/mail.php and set default mailer to ses

  ...
  'default' => env('MAIL_MAILER', 'ses'),
  ...

• Open config/services.php and set ses method:

  ...
  'default' => env('MAIL_MAILER', 'ses'), 
  'ses' => [ 
      'key' => env('AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID'), 
      'secret' => env('AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY'), 
      'region' => env('AWS_DEFAULT_REGION'), 
  ],
  ...

Method 2 – Configure Amazon SMTP

If you have got Amazon SMTP settings you can add these smtp settings directly to .env file. In this method you don’t need to edit config/mail.php or config/services.php file of your Laravel Application. Just set in .env file as:

MAIL_MAILER=smtp
MAIL_HOST=email-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com
MAIL_POR=587
MAIL_USERNAME=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
MAIL_PASSWORD=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
MAIL_ENCRYPTION=tls

Do Clear your Laravel Application cache and that should be it! An effective way to clear Laravel Applicaiton cache is demonstrated here.

Following above methods your Laravel application should be able to send messages via Amazon SES or Amazon SMTP service.

Also Read:

• How to Create folders recursively in Laravel (with Example)
• Laravel 8/9 Cron Job Task Scheduling Tutorial with examples
• How to Create Custom Log File in Laravel
• How to Clear cache in Laravel 9/8/7/6/5
• CSV Content Validation with FormRequest Rules in Laravel