How should an application handle email sending failures gracefully, and why is sending emails asynchronously through a queue often preferred over sending them directly during a web request?

Sending an email directly within a web request means the user has to wait for the potentially slow SMTP connection and delivery process to complete before their request finishes, and if the email server is temporarily unavailable, the entire request could fail, which is why many applications instead queue email sending as a background job, letting the main request complete quickly while a separate worker process handles the actual sending, including automatically retrying if the initial attempt fails.

// Instead of sending directly during the request
Mail::to($user->email)->queue(new WelcomeEmail($user));