Seems I have found the problem. There was fatal error in the text version of the template, which led laravel to use the last working version (still don't know from what cache though)

Hey pbohny. Sorry for replying to such an old thread but I am having the same issue. Emails sent from production are using an old version. I know production is getting the latest code because all other views are updating just fine. But emails are using some old version. I have deleted all caches so I am completely stumped at this point. Can you explain more about your solution?

If you are using queues with deployment you need to restart the workers (as described here: https://laravel.com/docs/5.2/queues#deploying-with-daemon-queue-listeners)

Thank you, Rias! It was that!