I’m having trouble with my Mailgun webhook setup. When I use the Test Sample POST feature in the Mailgun dashboard to test my webhook endpoint, I keep getting a 403 error response.
The weird thing is that when I test the same endpoint manually using tools like cURL or Postman, everything works perfectly fine. I get a 200 status code and can see all the data being processed correctly.
I’m building my application with Laravel and I’ve already added my webhook URL to the CSRF token exclusion list in the VerifyCsrfToken middleware, so that shouldn’t be the issue.
protected $except = [
'api/webhook/email-received',
];
Has anyone else run into this problem? What could be causing Mailgun’s test requests to fail with 403 while manual testing works fine?
check yur server access logs - see what mailgun’s actuallly sending compared to your manual tests. I’m betting the user-agent or another header is hitting a securrity rule. Had the same thing hapen where mod_security blocked mailgun but let postman/curl through because the request signatures were different.
Had this exact problem a few months back with Laravel. Turned out my server’s firewall was blocking Mailgun’s test requests - even though I’d already excluded the webhook route from CSRF protection. The real issue was my hosting provider’s security module rejecting requests that didn’t match specific headers or user agent patterns. I only figured this out after digging deeper into the server logs. Try whitelisting Mailgun’s IP addresses in your server config, or reach out to your hosting provider about webhook security rules. Also make sure your webhook URL matches exactly between your manual tests and the Mailgun dashboard - including trailing slashes and query parameters.
Same thing happened to me with a Laravel app last year. Wasn’t CSRF protection - it was Laravel’s throttling middleware blocking webhook requests. Mailgun’s test requests get rate-limited because they don’t send the same headers as your manual tests. Check if you’ve got rate limiting on your routes (RouteServiceProvider or directly on the webhook route). I had to exclude my webhook endpoint from throttling completely by adding it to the middleware exceptions. Also, check if your Laravel app’s behind a reverse proxy like Cloudflare - their security settings can mess with webhook deliveries even when manual testing works fine.