How We Fixed a Silent Email Bug in Our Laravel Quote Form (And How Tailwind Helped Catch Mobile Layout Issues)

The Quote Form That Almost Worked Perfectly

At AustinsElite, our quote request form is the front door to new client conversations. It’s a critical touchpoint—simple, clean, and built to convert. The frontend lives in a modern Blade template powered by Laravel 12, styled with Tailwind CSS, and backed by a custom mail handler. Everything looked solid. Submissions appeared to go through. Success messages popped up. But then we got the message: "We haven’t received your quote emails."

No errors. No logs. Just silence.

That’s the worst kind of bug.

The Silent Mail Class Mismatch

Our first clue came from a user reporting a missing quote submission. I checked the logs—nothing. No failed jobs, no exceptions. The form submitted successfully, returned a 200, and redirected as expected. But the email never arrived.

I dug into the controller handling the form:

Mail::to($email)->send(new QuoteRequestMail($data));

QuoteRequestMail—that class existed. It was in app/Mail/QuoteRequestMail.php. But something felt off. I opened it and compared it to our working ContactMail class. Then I saw it: a namespace mismatch.

The controller was calling:

use App\Mail\QuoteRequestMail;

But the actual file was saved as QuoteRequestMail.php, while the class inside was named class QuoteMail. Classic mismatch. PHP didn’t complain because the autoloader found a class in the file—but it wasn’t the one we were calling.

So new QuoteRequestMail($data) was throwing a Class 'App\Mail\QuoteRequestMail' not found error—but because we weren’t wrapping the Mail::send() in a try-catch and logging failures, it failed silently. No notification. No trace.

The fix was simple:

// Rename the class in the file
class QuoteRequestMail extends Mailable

And add error handling:

try {
    Mail::to($email)->send(new QuoteRequestMail($data));
} catch (Exception $e) {
    \Log::error('Quote email failed: ' . $e->getMessage());
}

Suddenly, the emails started flowing. And if they fail again, we’ll know.

Tailwind to the Rescue on Mobile

While debugging the backend, I noticed something else: on mobile, the footer hero section was smashed into the content. On desktop, it looked great—generous padding, clean separation. But on iPhone, the margin collapsed.

The Blade template used:

<div class="mt-20 sm:mt-16 md:mt-20">

Looks fine, right? But here’s the catch: sm: applies at 640px, which is portrait mobile. So on smaller screens, it was using mt-16, but our design needed mt-8 for mobile to avoid visual clutter.

I adjusted the classes:

<div class="mt-20 sm:mt-8 md:mt-16">

Now, mobile gets a tighter margin, tablet scales up, and desktop keeps the full breathability. I tested across devices using Chrome DevTools and confirmed the fix.

What I love about Tailwind is that it makes responsive tweaks visible in the markup. No digging through CSS files. No mystery overrides. Just classes that tell you exactly what’s happening—and when.

Lessons from the Trenches

This two-part bug taught me a few hard lessons:

Silent failures are deadly. Always wrap external interactions—email, APIs, file writes—in try-catch blocks and log the hell out of them. A 200 response doesn’t mean success.
Class name ≠ file name ≠ class usage. PHP’s autoloader is forgiving, but that forgiveness hides bugs. Use static analysis tools like PHPStan or Laravel Pint to catch mismatches early.
Responsive design isn’t optional. Test on real devices, not just emulators. Tailwind’s utility-first approach makes it easy to tweak, but you still have to look.
Blade and Tailwind are a powerful combo—but only if you respect the details. A single misplaced class can break the experience for half your users.

At the end of the day, our quote form now works as intended: submissions go through, emails get sent, and mobile users see a clean, intentional layout. No magic—just attention to detail.

If you’re building forms in Laravel, don’t assume success just because the frontend behaves. Check the backend. Check the logs. And always, always test on mobile.