How to send both HTML and Plain Text Password Reset Emails in Laravel 5.1

Laravel comes with an included Authentication system complete with password resets that saves you from the burden of having to set it manually on all your projects. In one of the apps I built, there have been reports of the password reset not making it to the end users. It just so happens that all email is being sent through a third party system which tracks sends and deliveries.

In this case, the emails were being sent and reported being delivered but the user kept claiming they didn’t receive it, the obvious culprit of it going to spam/bulk mail. In the research process, it was discovered that we only sent an HTML password reset without any text fallback. Maybe that was the reason?

This seemed like a simple improvement and could at least rule out that as a possibility. However, now all the mail is handled inside the Illuminate components and I couldn’t find any documentation on how to send both.

At this point, I started digging to try and see how Laravel is sending the email. Inside PasswordBroker I found an emailResetLink method which is how it is actually sent:

$view <strong class="markup--strong markup--pre-strong">= </strong>$this<strong class="markup--strong markup--pre-strong">-></strong>emailView;
return $this->mailer->send($view,

Now it’s just a matter of figuring out where “$view” came from and I didn’t have to look far. Inside the constructor it is injected:

public function __construct(TokenRepositoryInterface $tokens,
                            UserProvider $users,
                            MailerContract $mailer,
                            $emailView)

Next question is, where is the instantiated? Doing a project search for the class name lead me to the registerPasswordBroker in the PasswordResetServiceProvider. This pulls in from the config file:

$view = $app[‘config’][‘auth.password.email’];

Opening config/auth.php shows how it’s defined by default:

'password' => [
    'email' => 'emails.password',

Almost there. Going back to the mail documentation it shows you can send both with this call:

send(['html.view', 'text.view'], $data, $callback);

That means it’s just a matter of adjust the auth.password.email to be an array instead of the string:

'password' => [
    'email' => ['emails.password', 'emails.text-password]',

Don’t leave your users stranded–send both for an important email like this.

One of the benefits to Laravel is at almost every turn there is a simple way of solving a given problem and this is just one example. I hope by me outlining the steps I took to solve the problem it gives you insight into finding your own way around the next time you get stumped.