Add BCC to all outgoing emails from your Laravel application

Sometimes it's very helpful to debug all your outgoing emails -or part of them- from your Laravel app, especially in the early stage of the product's release ¹.

By default, Laravel fires two events every time an email is about to send MessageSending and when it sent MessageSent and that works both for normal mailables and mail notifications.

You may register an event listener (let's call it MessageSendingListener) for this events in your EventServiceProvider as follow:

<?php

namespace App\Providers;

use App\Listeners\MessageSendingListener;
use Illuminate\Mail\Events\MessageSending;
// ..

class EventServiceProvider extends ServiceProvider
{
    // ..
    protected $listen = [
        MessageSending::class => [
            MessageSendingListener::class
        ],
    ];
    // ...
}

Now, create the listener by running:

php artisan make:listener MessageSendingListener

Then, add the following code to your listener:

<?php

namespace App\Listeners;

use Illuminate\Mail\Events\MessageSending;

class MessageSendingListener
{
    public function handle(MessageSending $event)
    {
        if(! env("DEBUG_EMAILS")) { return; }

        $event->message->addBcc('youremail@example.com'); // you can pass an array as well
    }
}

If you notice, I added the env check DEBUG_EMAILS to make it easier to stop/resume debugging outgoings emails.

To activate sending BCC emails, just add the following key to your .env file.

DEBUG_EMAILS=true