How do I send an email with Laravel 4 without using a view?

Question

I'm developing a site using Laravel 4 and would like to send myself ad-hoc emails during testing, but it seems like the only way to send emails is to go through a view.

Is it possible to do something like this?

Mail::queue('This is the body of my email', $data, function($message)
{
    $message->to('foo@example.com', 'John Smith')->subject('This is my subject');
});

Answer 1

As mentioned in an answer on Laravel mail: pass string instead of view, you can do this (code copied verbatim from Jarek's answer):

Mail::send([], [], function ($message) {
  $message->to(..)
    ->subject(..)
    // here comes what you want
    ->setBody('Hi, welcome user!');
});

---

You can also use an empty view, by putting this into app/views/email/blank.blade.php

{{{ $msg }}}

And nothing else. Then you code

Mail::queue('email.blank', array('msg' => 'This is the body of my email'), function($message)
{
    $message->to('foo@example.com', 'John Smith')->subject('This is my subject');
});

And this allows you to send custom blank emails from different parts of your application without having to create different views for each one.

Answer 2

If you want to send just text, you can use included method:

Mail::raw('Message text', function($message) {
    $message->from('us@example.com', 'Laravel');
    $message->to('foo@example.com')->cc('bar@example.com');
});

Answer 3

No, with out of the box Laravel Mail you will have to pass a view, even if it is empty. You would need to write your own mailer to enable that functionality.