I’m having trouble with my Mailgun webhook setup. When I use the Test Sample POST feature in the Mailgun dashboard to check my route, my application keeps returning a 403 forbidden status code. The weird thing is that when I test the same API endpoint manually with tools like cURL or Postman, everything works perfectly. I get a 200 status response and can see all the data being processed correctly. I’m building this 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. Has anyone encountered this before? What could be causing Mailgun’s test requests to fail with 403 while direct API calls work fine?
Had the same issue a few months ago - turned out to be IP whitelisting on my server. Your hosting provider might be blocking Mailgun’s IP ranges even though you excluded the route from CSRF protection. Check your firewall and security rules first. Also double-check your Laravel route accepts POST requests and doesn’t have extra middleware getting in the way. I’d look at your web server logs too - they’ll show you exactly why Mailgun gets a 403 while your manual tests work fine.
Check if HTTP authentication is enabled on your staging or production environment. Developers often forget they’ve added basic auth protection - this blocks Mailgun’s automated requests but won’t affect your manual Postman testing since you’re bypassing it. Rate limiting is another common issue. Some hosting providers or security plugins automatically throttle requests from certain sources. I hit this exact problem last year - my server’s mod_security rules flagged Mailgun’s user agent as suspicious. Try disabling security modules temporarily or check your error logs during the webhook test to see what’s actually triggering the 403.
sounds like user-agent blocking. mailgun’s headers can trigger security filters. check if your server or cloudflare has user-agent filtering enabled. also try temporarily disabling ddos protection - it sometimes flags webhook traffic as suspicious.
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