Papercut VS maildev

Do you need it to actually send, or just receive for testing? Because if it's testing you need then you should look into paper cut SMTP. https://github.com/ChangemakerStudios/Papercut-SMTP

As I said before Maildev is a neat and easy to use SMTP server that is great for development since you can have your application act as though its really sending emails and have that intercepted directly and reviewed in a neat GUI application. It's a nice way to solve the problem of testing emails but you are certainly welcome to do something else, possible dangerous, like actually send emails from your development box :). Again, I want you to start thinking about chaining applications together as a cluster of single purpose containers, all talking to each other via simple conventions and environment variables (for example you might have noticed that the DB_HOST was the same as the name of the database container; Docker does a great job of offering simple conventions like that which really save a lot of setup headache.

This looks quite nice and lean, we started using https://github.com/maildev/maildev especially for the arm64 support.

Reading about maildev, it seems to be a STMP server for testing. I assume then, the problem is in the mail() function.

There are other options besides running a fully blown internal mail server. You could try https://github.com/maildev/maildev or https://github.com/mailhog/MailHog (no longer being developed but still working great) if it is enough for your use case.

I was able to implement a simple verification link that a new user can click to confirm their account. However, my implementation is only up to localhost environment using maildev.

In my case, I used docker-compose to do this, but please read accordingly. Of course, you can also use Docker commands to run it, and even if you don't have Docker environment, you can install and use it with npm command. For more information, please look at official document here .