Shopify Email vs Dedicated Business Email Hosting

Shopify merchants often conflate marketing email with operational mail. You need both: campaigns from Shopify or Klaviyo, and human support@ on a real mailbox.

Shopify Email is for campaigns, not conversations

Shopify Email is Shopify’s marketing app for newsletters and promotions. Shopify also sends order confirmations and shipping notifications from your store. Neither gives your team a mailbox to read and answer customer questions. For that you need a mail host, with MX records on your store domain pointing to it. Shopify can forward addresses on domains bought through it, but forwarding still means replying from somewhere else.

A typical setup for a store

• support@ — customer questions, returns and complaints, in a real mailbox
• orders@ or wholesale@ — larger buyers and resellers
• Shopify notifications sent with your store’s sender address, authenticated as Shopify’s settings describe
• Marketing campaigns from Shopify Email or another tool, following that tool’s domain authentication steps

Keep one SPF record

Each service that sends as your domain may ask you to add something to SPF. A domain can have only one SPF record, so combine the entries into a single TXT records (short text lines in DNS used for email security) rather than adding a second one. OquMail generates its own SPF, DKIM and DMARC values, and our SPF setup guide shows how to merge them.

Want to see how your own domain is set up? Use the free SPF checker: it runs in your browser and stores nothing.