It considered bad practise to send mail through your own server instead a lot of people will use some form of SMTP but STMP can be slow and its recommended that you use API from a large provider. We've chosen Mailgun as they offer 10,000 emails for free per month which should be enough for most sites.
Sign up for account at Mailgun. Once signed up you can go Domains -> Add Your Domain. If I was setting one up for bigbitecreative.com I would enter into the box: mg.bigbitecreative.com. You will be asked to make some changes to DNS, once these are completed you should see this at the top of your settings:
Now lets open the .env and you see some mailgun settings:
MAILGUN_KEY=key-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx-xxxx
MAILGUN_DOMAIN=domain.com
[email protected]
Lets update them with the info above.
MAILGUN_KEY=key-myapikey-here
MAILGUN_DOMAIN=mg.bigbitecreative.com
[email protected]
And thats it your site will now be using Mailgun to send emails.