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MailDev

What is MailDev?​

MailDev is a simple SMTP testing tool: it catches outgoing dev email and shows it in a web UI instead of delivering it, similar in purpose to Mailpit and MailHog. Laradock builds it as its own container from the official maildev/maildev image.

Start MailDev​

./laradock start maildev

MailDev keeps no volume on disk, everything it catches lives in the container's memory only. That's fine for day-to-day dev testing, just know that stopping or removing the container discards every captured email (see Clear captured mail below if you want to do that on purpose without restarting).

Stop MailDev​

Stopping just pauses the container:

./laradock stop maildev

To remove the container:

./laradock remove maildev

Since MailDev has no data volume, stopping or removing it has the same practical effect either way: whatever mail was captured is gone once the container isn't running.

Configuration​

All settings live in maildev/defaults.env and can be overridden by adding the same line to your own .env:

VariableDefaultWhat it does
MAILDEV_HTTP_PORT1080Host-side port for the web UI (container port 1080).
MAILDEV_SMTP_PORT25Host-side port for the SMTP catcher (container port 25).

Connect your app​

Open the web UI at http://localhost:1080. Point your app's SMTP settings at the maildev container name (not localhost) on its internal SMTP port:

MAIL_MAILER=smtp
MAIL_HOST=maildev
MAIL_PORT=25
MAIL_USERNAME=null
MAIL_PASSWORD=null

Clear captured mail​

MailDev has no "delete all" data-wipe step the way a database would, since it never writes to disk. To clear what's currently showing in the web UI:

  • From the UI: open http://localhost:1080 and use the trash/delete-all icon in the toolbar to clear every captured message, or delete individual messages from their row.
  • From the REST API: MailDev exposes a small HTTP API on the same port as the web UI. To delete everything:
curl -X DELETE http://localhost:1080/email/all

Restarting or removing the container achieves the same result, since nothing is persisted between runs anyway.

Common issues​

  • Mail isn't showing up in the UI. Confirm your app's .env uses MAIL_HOST=maildev (the container name), not localhost or 127.0.0.1, those only resolve from your host machine, not from inside another container.
  • Port 25 conflicts on your host. Port 25 is often reserved or blocked by ISPs/host mail agents. Change MAILDEV_SMTP_PORT in .env and restart: ./laradock restart maildev.
  • Port already in use for the web UI. Change MAILDEV_HTTP_PORT in .env and restart: ./laradock restart maildev.
  • Captured mail disappeared. Expected if the container was stopped, removed, or restarted, MailDev keeps everything in memory only, there's no volume backing it.

Prefer a more actively maintained, Go-based catcher? See Mailpit. New to Laradock? Start with Getting Started.