Send emails with PHP & Laravel

MailBlastr ships an official PHP package — composer require mailblastr/mailblastr. If you want it, start at Send emails with PHP, which installs the package and sends a first email with $mailblastr->emails->send(...).

This guide shows the raw-HTTP alternative instead: Laravel ships a clean HTTP client (the Http facade, built on Guzzle) that makes calling the REST API a few lines, and plain PHP works with the built-in cURL extension. Both call POST /emails with your mb_ Bearer token. The official package works the same inside Laravel — resolve it from the container or construct it in a service class.

Prerequisites

1. A verified domain for your from address. (guide)
2. An API key (mb_...), stored in your .env as MAILBLASTR_API_KEY. (Authentication)
3. Laravel 9+ (for the Http facade) — or any PHP 8.1+ with the curl and json extensions enabled. PHP 8.1 is the floor declared by the official mailblastr/mailblastr package; the raw-cURL path shown here also runs on PHP 8.0.

Laravel (Http facade)

Reference the key from config/env, not inline. The Http facade lets you inspect the status and pull JSON fields directly.

<?php

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Http;

$response = Http::withToken(env('MAILBLASTR_API_KEY'))
    ->acceptJson()
    ->post('https://www.mailblastr.com/api/emails', [
        'from' => 'Acme <hello@yourdomain.com>',
        'to' => ['delivered@mailblastr.dev'],
        'subject' => 'Hello from Laravel',
        'html' => '<p>Sent with the Http facade.</p>',
    ]);

if ($response->failed()) {
    // MailBlastr returns { statusCode, name, message }.
    abort($response->status(), $response->json('message'));
}

$id = $response->json('id');

Plain PHP (cURL)

Without a framework, the cURL extension sends the same request.

<?php

$apiKey = getenv('MAILBLASTR_API_KEY');

$ch = curl_init('https://www.mailblastr.com/api/emails');
curl_setopt_array($ch, [
    CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
    CURLOPT_POST => true,
    CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER => [
        'Authorization: Bearer ' . $apiKey,
        'Content-Type: application/json',
        // cURL sends no User-Agent by default and the API rejects that with 403.
        'User-Agent: my-app/1.0',
    ],
    CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS => json_encode([
        'from' => 'Acme <hello@yourdomain.com>',
        'to' => ['delivered@mailblastr.dev'],
        'subject' => 'Hello from PHP',
        'html' => '<p>Sent with cURL.</p>',
    ]),
]);

$body = curl_exec($ch);
$status = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
curl_close($ch);

$data = json_decode($body, true);
if ($status >= 400) {
    throw new RuntimeException("MailBlastr {$data['name']}: {$data['message']}");
}

echo "Sent email {$data['id']}\n";

Handling the response

A successful send returns HTTP 200 with { "id": "..." }. Errors return a non-2xx status with a { statusCode, name, message } body — check the status ($response->failed() or the cURL HTTP_CODE) before reading the id. Keep the id to retrieve the email or correlate webhook events.

Next steps

• Prefer the official package? Send emails with PHP installs mailblastr/mailblastr and does the same send in three lines.
• See the full Send Email API reference.
• Read Authentication for key permissions.
• Start from the Quickstart.