@Stagger-Lee Mailhog isn't ment to be persistent in any way. If you want persistence, I suggest you try mailtrap.io for that.
But I cannot imagine why would anyone want persistence for local email development... I've been doing it for years and I'm happy to see them go away at the end of the day...
@leokhoa Thank you! It's really a great help!
@Stagger-Lee
MailHog will act as a local smtp server, so when you create the smtp connection with PHPMailer, you need to give it the following settings:
MAIL_DRIVER=smtp
MAIL_HOST=127.0.0.1
MAIL_PORT=1025
MAIL_USERNAME=testuser
MAIL_PASSWORD=testpwd
Ports can change depending on the config you set up MailHog with. It's also possible that it won't require any authentication... depends on the use case.
@leokhoa Thanks for looking into this 
And the info about the procfile 
Hi!
Love the great work & effort you've been putting into Laragon!
Behind huge company proxies it can be difficult to use mail trap / send services as they generate traffic which is frowned upon by company IT.
But there's a locally available alternative to these online services, which can happily introduce chaos in to the connection as well. It's called MailHog
https://github.com/mailhog/MailHog
It's got ready made windows binaries as well which can be configured by the command line or environment variables.
I don't presume to know how much work goes into on-boarding a tool like mySQL or any version of php for that matter, but It doesn't seem as the hardest challenge in the basket