Eloquent where clause not working as expected

I'm currently working on a private messaging system in Laravel.

I am trying to display a list of message threads in a user's inbox. This works similar to how an instant messaging system displays messages whereby all messages between 2 users are stored in a single thread.

The issue I am having is that I have multiple message types: "Message" and "Task". In the "Message" inbox, I only want to display message threads with the thread type as "Message". To do this I am using the following code in my controller:

    $messageThreads = Thread::where('type', 'Message')
    ->where('sender_id', $user)
    ->orWhere('recipient_id', $user)
    ->get()
    ->sortByDesc('updated_at');

This however isn't working and is still retrieving message threads where the type is "Task" instead of being limited to "Message"

I have also tried:

     $messageThreads = Thread::where('sender_id', $user)
    ->orWhere('recipient_id', $user)
    ->where('type', 'Message')
    ->get()
    ->sortByDesc('updated_at');

But this also returned the same result.

The interesting thing is if I just leave it as

$messageThreads = Thread::where('type', 'Message')

It will only retrieve messages with the type "Message". It is only when I add the other "where" clauses, that it stops working properly.

via Chebli Mohamed