Homestead and lumen not able to send emails 504 Gateway Time-out

Hello there, I was coding a web APP using the incredible lumen framework on windows using xamp, but after a few issues with routing and so own, I decided to give homestead and vagrant a try.

I managed to get homestead installed and the routing is working better than xamp, but when I tried to use the mail function from php I found that command sendmail wasn't installed on the homestead virtual machine cause i was getting a 500 internal server error, and with xampp email sending was working just fine. So with shh I did a simple sudo apt-get install sendmail to install it. But when now whenever I try to use the mail function from php it just waits and waits and eventually I get a 504 Gateway Time-out.

What might be happening and what can I do to solve it?

BTW: If you have any suggestions to replace the simple mail function for something else that works I'm willing to try it!

Thank you guys for your time.