Laravel 5 adding HTML to email
Stefan Bogdanescu
Founder & Senior Architect · 2026-06-29
# Mastering HTML Emails in Laravel: Solving the Plain Text Problem
Creating professional, visually appealing emails is a common requirement for any application, and integrating rich HTML content into Laravel mailers can sometimes present tricky hurdles. As developers, we often run into issues where perfectly formatted HTML strings are sent as plain text, which defeats the purpose of designing a beautiful email template.
This post dives deep into the specific issue you encountered when trying to insert HTML tags (like `
`) into an email body within Laravel 5 and how to ensure your content renders correctly across various email clients. ## The Pitfall: Why Your HTML Isn't Rendering You are running into a classic problem related to data escaping and MIME content handling. When you send an email via Laravel’s Mail facade, the system needs to correctly interpret the payload as HTML rather than plain text. In your example, when you pass a string containing `
` directly into the mailer, the underlying mechanism treats it as raw character data. Even if you use Blade syntax like `{{{ $text }}}` in your view file, this only controls how Blade processes the *view* layer; it doesn't fix the fundamental issue of what the Mail driver receives for the MIME body. The result is that instead of seeing line breaks rendered as actual line breaks (via HTML tags), you see the literal characters `
` displayed to the end-user. This happens because the email system defaults to a plain text interpretation unless explicitly instructed otherwise. ## The Solution: Ensuring True HTML Content Delivery To successfully send an HTML email, you must ensure two things: 1. The content being sent is valid, correctly structured HTML. 2. The mailer knows the message type is `text/html`. The key to solving this lies in preparing your data and ensuring the Mail facade is handling it as a true HTML message. ### Step 1: Prepare Your Content for Email Instead of relying on simple string concatenation, ensure that any line breaks or formatting you intend to use are correctly represented using HTML tags within the string itself. For example, instead of relying on raw `
` elements in plain text variables, you should structure your content as full HTML blocks. If you need basic line breaks, standard HTML practices dictate using `
` tags, and ensure all other formatting is wrapped appropriately inside your email template (the layout view). ### Step 2: Utilizing the Correct Mail Method While the `Mail::send` method is powerful, ensure you are sending the content designated for an HTML body. For complex HTML emails, it is often best practice to structure your mailables to handle the HTML entirely within the view context, rather than passing raw, unvalidated strings directly into the `$text` variable if that variable is intended only as a simple text block. If you are building a completely custom email template, leveraging Laravel’s Blade features ensures consistency. For instance, in your layout file, ensure the container structure forces the content to be interpreted as HTML: ```html
`) into an email body within Laravel 5 and how to ensure your content renders correctly across various email clients. ## The Pitfall: Why Your HTML Isn't Rendering You are running into a classic problem related to data escaping and MIME content handling. When you send an email via Laravel’s Mail facade, the system needs to correctly interpret the payload as HTML rather than plain text. In your example, when you pass a string containing `
` directly into the mailer, the underlying mechanism treats it as raw character data. Even if you use Blade syntax like `{{{ $text }}}` in your view file, this only controls how Blade processes the *view* layer; it doesn't fix the fundamental issue of what the Mail driver receives for the MIME body. The result is that instead of seeing line breaks rendered as actual line breaks (via HTML tags), you see the literal characters `
` displayed to the end-user. This happens because the email system defaults to a plain text interpretation unless explicitly instructed otherwise. ## The Solution: Ensuring True HTML Content Delivery To successfully send an HTML email, you must ensure two things: 1. The content being sent is valid, correctly structured HTML. 2. The mailer knows the message type is `text/html`. The key to solving this lies in preparing your data and ensuring the Mail facade is handling it as a true HTML message. ### Step 1: Prepare Your Content for Email Instead of relying on simple string concatenation, ensure that any line breaks or formatting you intend to use are correctly represented using HTML tags within the string itself. For example, instead of relying on raw `
` elements in plain text variables, you should structure your content as full HTML blocks. If you need basic line breaks, standard HTML practices dictate using `
` tags, and ensure all other formatting is wrapped appropriately inside your email template (the layout view). ### Step 2: Utilizing the Correct Mail Method While the `Mail::send` method is powerful, ensure you are sending the content designated for an HTML body. For complex HTML emails, it is often best practice to structure your mailables to handle the HTML entirely within the view context, rather than passing raw, unvalidated strings directly into the `$text` variable if that variable is intended only as a simple text block. If you are building a completely custom email template, leveraging Laravel’s Blade features ensures consistency. For instance, in your layout file, ensure the container structure forces the content to be interpreted as HTML: ```html
{{ $text }}
```