Bulk Email Delivery Issues with Laravel and Mailgun for Large Recipient Lists

Other Questions Mailgun
1

I’m working with Laravel 5.5 and Mailgun to send marketing emails to a large group of subscribers. My current list has around 700 people but I expect it to grow to several thousand soon.

Right now I’m using a simple foreach loop to send emails one by one, but this approach is causing problems. Only about 530 emails actually get delivered out of the 700 I’m trying to send. The rest just don’t go through for some reason.

I’ve been looking online for better ways to handle bulk email sending but haven’t found clear explanations that work for my situation. Does anyone know the right approach to make sure all emails in a large campaign actually get sent?

public function sendBulkEmails()
{
    // Retrieve subscriber data from API
    $subscribers = json_decode($response->getBody());
    $siteUrl = config('app.site_url');

    foreach($subscribers as $index => $subscriber){
        Mail::to($subscriber)
            ->send(new CampaignEmail($data, $subscriber, $siteUrl));
    }
    
    $result = ['status' => 'Campaign sent successfully'];
    return response()->view('campaigns.result', $result, 200);
}
2

Your foreach loop will definitely timeout and run out of memory with bigger lists. I hit the same wall around 500 recipients. Queue system with batch processing saved me. Don’t send everything at once - break it into chunks of 50-100 emails per batch. This keeps you under Mailgun’s rate limits and handles errors way better. Wrap your Mail::send() calls in try-catch blocks to log failures. Use database queues instead of sync queues in production - they’re much more reliable for bulk sends.

3

totally! mailgun has limits, so yeah spacing them out helps. also, try using Laravel queues, it makes sending bulk emails much easier and better for manageability.

4

Your delivery issue is probably Mailgun’s rate limiting plus script timeouts. I had the same problem with ~800 recipients and job queues with retry logic completely fixed it. Use Laravel’s queue workers with a failed jobs table to track what doesn’t send. Check your Mailgun dashboard for bounces and API errors - sometimes emails get rejected on their end but your app doesn’t catch it. Set up error handling to log Mailgun’s response for each send so you can spot patterns in the missing deliveries.