How We Fixed Email Routing in Production: A Laravel + Livewire Debugging Story

The Bug: "Why Are User Messages Landing in My Personal Inbox?"

It was a quiet Tuesday morning when I got a Slack message that made my coffee pause mid-sip: "Hey Ryan, did you get that contact form submission?"

I hadn’t. But worse—yes, I had.

A user’s message intended for Austin’s Elite customer support had somehow landed in my personal Gmail. Not the shared inbox. Not a ticketing system. My inbox. The one I use for online shopping confirmations and spam.

This wasn’t just awkward—it was a production incident. Our contact form, a critical touchpoint for leads, was misrouting emails. And if it was happening to one user, it might’ve been happening to more.

We use Laravel 12 with Livewire for the core AustinsElite application (not Next.js—that label was outdated). The form itself was Livewire-powered, clean and reactive. But somewhere between form submission and SMTP handoff, something had gone sideways.

Root Cause: A Forgotten Test Config That Slipped Into Production

My first instinct? Check the .env files across environments. Staging had [email protected]—fine. Production should’ve had [email protected]. But logs showed submissions were still going to my personal address.

That’s when I remembered: we’d recently added a debug override during local testing. A quick config patch in config/mail.php that forced all outgoing mail to my personal email for QA. It looked like this:

// Temporary during testing — REMOVE BEFORE MERGE
'from' => [
    'address' => env('MAIL_FROM_ADDRESS', '[email protected]'),
    'name' => env('MAIL_FROM_NAME', 'Austin\'s Elite'),
],
'to' => [
    'address' => '[email protected]', // <-- THE CULPRIT
    'name' => 'Test Receiver',
],

The comment said "REMOVE BEFORE MERGE". But guess what? It never got removed. And worse—it wasn’t in the .env. It was hardcoded in config, committed, and deployed.

Because this was in the config file itself, not environment-driven, it bypassed all our staging/production isolation. Every environment ran the same override. And because it was subtle, it flew under the radar during review.

Classic config drift. A tiny, silent betrayal hiding in plain sight.

Fix & Prevention: Locking Down Environments with SMTP2Go

The fix was two-pronged: immediate rollback and long-term isolation.

First, I reverted the config change with a hotfix commit: fix: Restore production email recipient for contact form submissions. The to override was removed, and Laravel fell back to using properly scoped environment variables. Within minutes, new submissions were hitting [email protected].

But that wasn’t enough. We needed to prevent this class of error forever.

Enter SMTP2Go.

We’d been evaluating transactional email services for better deliverability, especially for form submissions that often trigger spam filters. SMTP2Go offered clean Laravel integration, detailed logs, and—critically—per-environment routing controls.

I added the smtp2go driver via the laravel-smtp2go package and restructured our mail transport:

# .env.staging
MAIL_MAILER=smtp
MAIL_HOST=mail.smtp2go.com
MAIL_PORT=2525
MAIL_USERNAME=staging_smtp2go_key
MAIL_PASSWORD=***
[email protected]

# .env.production
MAIL_MAILER=smtp
MAIL_HOST=mail.smtp2go.com
MAIL_PORT=2525
MAIL_USERNAME=prod_smtp2go_key
MAIL_PASSWORD=***
[email protected]

Now, routing is driven entirely by environment. No hardcoded addresses. No config overrides. Just clean, auditable .env values.

We also added a deployment check: any PR modifying config/mail.php now triggers a mandatory review from two team members. Plus, we use Laravel’s config:clear in deploy scripts to prevent cached config drift.

Lessons Learned: Trust the Environment, Not the Hack

This wasn’t a framework flaw. It wasn’t a Livewire quirk. It was a process gap—relying on temporary hacks without safeguards.

The takeaway?

1. Never hardcode routing logic, even temporarily.
2. Treat config files like code—review them, test them, and guard them.
3. Use environment-aware services like SMTP2Go to enforce separation by design, not discipline.

Email deliverability isn’t just about spam scores. It’s about trust, routing, and configuration hygiene. And sometimes, the smallest config override can turn your personal inbox into an accidental support portal.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m setting up an auto-responder on that test address—just in case.