In development and QA, i'd like to record the Mail object's transaction history to a DB table, but am unsure as to how to go about accessing the data for the class. At the moment i do not want to log to a static file.

It's particularly useful for tracing emails - a lot of users experience problems when doing password resets etc because their provider (Hotmail, Gmail) marks the mail as spam, meaning i get a lot "i never got the email it was supposed to send" messages. Looking it up in the DB means i can see directly that the email was sent successfully, and the problem lies with them, not on the server-side. Equally, it helps debug SMTP errors.

 // try/catch block {

Mail::send('emails.any_view', $data, function($message) use ($user) {
    $message->from('server@example.com', 'PHP Code');
    $message->to($user->email);
    $message->subject($subject);
    
    // logging code here, e.g.
    /*
   If( Config::get('record_smtp') ) {
       $record = new MailRecord;
       $record->to          = $user->email; //(or id)
       $record->subject  = $subject;
       $record->body     = $message->getBody(); //(not sure if that's correct)
       $record->result    = 1; //(or 0 if it goes wrong)
       $record->smtp_transaction = $message->isThereAMethodToGetThis();
       $record->save();
   }
   */
});