Can only send email to myself using Laravel 5 and Mailgun

Question

I've been able to successfully send an email to myself using a combination of Laravel 5 and Mailgun but I am getting a frustrating "bad request" error when I try to change just one line of the code. Specifically, when I change this line:

$message->to('xxx@mydomain.com') to an email that is not the one used by my Mailgun account, I get a bad request error. That is the only thing I am changing.

Edit (here is my code):

Mail::send('emails.alerts.assess_tomorrow', $view_data, function($message) {
$message->to('xxx@mydomain.com')->subject('test 23')->from('xxx@mydomain.com');
            });

Edit2 (my mail.php code):

<?php

return [

        'driver' => 'mailgun',
        'host' => 'smtp.mailgun.org',
        'port' => 587,
        'from' => ['address' => 'xxx@mydomain.com', 'name' => 'A Name'],
    'encryption' => 'tls',
        'username' => 'my mailgun postmaster username',
        'password' => 'my mailgun password',
    'sendmail' => '/usr/sbin/sendmail -bs',
    'pretend' => false,

];

I have installed Guzzle and updated laravel. As I mentioned, this works perfectly when the "to" email is to myself (the address used by my mailgun account).

In other words, I can only send an email to myself. So I know the code is basically working, but it seems changing the "to" address (for example to my gmail address), results in the bad request error.

Am I missing something obvious? Many thanks for any ideas!

Answer 1

SOLVED! What a maroon I am. I didn't notice that my mailgun account needed to be verified before I could send an email to other addresses.

I logged into mailgun and resent the activation email. After the account was activated, everything worked perfectly. Sorry to take up your time but perhaps this might help other wayward folks!