Supercharge Your Laravel App With Queues – A Developer’s Experience With Background Email Sending

When I first started working with Laravel, background jobs were just a buzzword to me. I had heard they were great for performance and user experience — but like many developers, I didn’t really need them. At least, that’s what I thought.

Then came the day I implemented email sending in a registration flow, and I learned exactly why Laravel Queues are so powerful.

Here’s my full experience using Laravel Queues to send emails in the background — from confusion to confidence.

🔍 What Are Laravel Queues?

Laravel Queues let you defer heavy or slow tasks to be processed later — asynchronously — in the background.

Instead of executing a task (like sending an email) in the middle of an HTTP request, you dispatch it to a job that runs on a separate process.

It’s like asking your assistant to send a thank-you note, while you move on to your next meeting.

Supported queue drivers include:

• sync (no queue — executes immediately)

• database

• Redis ✅ (high-performance and scalable)

• Amazon SQS, Beanstalkd, and more

🎯 Why I Needed Queues (Email Problem)

I was building a user registration system. After successful registration, we wanted to send a welcome email.

So I did this:

Mail::to($user->email)->send(new WelcomeEmail($user));

it worked — until I tested it on production.

😫 The user had to wait 4-6 seconds before getting the success message.
😱 Sometimes the SMTP provider (Mailgun) failed, and the entire registration failed.
🤯 If I sent emails to multiple users in a loop — it crashed the server.

I knew then: this should not be happening in real-time.
Email sending is a background job.

That’s when I decided to implement Laravel Queues.

🛠️ How I Integrated Queued Emails (Step-by-Step)

Let me walk you through exactly how I restructured the app to use queues for sending emails in the background.

📦 Step 1: Configure .env for Queues

In the .env file, I changed the queue connection to database for easy setup:

QUEUE_CONNECTION=database

Then I ran the queue table migrations:

php artisan queue:table
php artisan queue:failed-table
php artisan migrate

💌 Step 2: Create the Mailable

I already had a Mailable:

php artisan make:mail WelcomeEmail --markdown=emails.welcome

In WelcomeEmail.php, I made one small change — added the ShouldQueue interface:

use Illuminate\Contracts\Queue\ShouldQueue;

class WelcomeEmail extends Mailable implements ShouldQueue
{
    public function __construct(public User $user) {}

    public function build()
    {
        return $this->subject('Welcome to our platform!')
                    ->markdown('emails.welcome');
    }
}

That’s the key! This tells Laravel: “Don’t send this now — queue it!”

🧠 Step 3: Update Controller to Queue Email

Instead of send(), I used queue():

use App\Mail\WelcomeEmail;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Mail;

Mail::to($user->email)->queue(new WelcomeEmail($user));

Now Laravel inserts this email into the jobs table instead of firing it immediately.

🏃 Step 4: Start the Worker

To actually process the queue, you need a worker running:

php artisan queue:work

Once this is running, it picks up jobs from the queue and executes them — sending the email without blocking the main user request.

💌 Email View (Optional)

Here's what my markdown email looked like (resources/views/emails/welcome.blade.php):

@component('mail::message')
# Welcome {{ $user->name }} 🎉

Thanks for joining our platform!

We're excited to have you on board.  
Click below to get started:

@component('mail::button', ['url' => route('login')])
Login Now
@endcomponent

Thanks,  
{{ config('app.name') }}
@endcomponent

🧭 Where to Use Queues (and Where Not to)

✅ Use Queues For:

• Sending emails (welcome, newsletters, notifications)

• Generating and uploading reports

• Processing payments

• Resizing or uploading images

• Calling 3rd-party APIs

🚫 Avoid Queues When:

• You need real-time feedback (like showing a calculated result on screen)

• The job is too lightweight to justify backgrounding

💡 Lessons I Learned

• Always implement queues when jobs can be run on the background that will not hamper user experience.

• You’ll immediately feel the difference in user experience — faster responses, and more reliability.

• Jobs that fail don’t crash your app — they’re retried or logged.

• You can monitor queues with tools like Laravel Horizon if you use Redis.

✅ Final Thoughts

Implementing queues for email sending changed the way I think about responsiveness and performance. Instead of trying to make everything fast, I learned to move the heavy lifting out of the user’s way.

Laravel Queues make that incredibly easy. And once you set them up — it’s like giving your app a second engine that quietly handles the hard stuff.


✍️ Next will be on Queue jobs monitoring with Horizon

Happy coding 📍