Help · Settings
Email settings
Settings → Email holds how your store's email goes out. Your store name and address are on the Store page, and your sending domain has a page of its own.
Email settings holds where a reply goes, your two typefaces, the two addresses your email goes out from, your frequency limit and the catch-all switch. Your From name and store address are on Store settings, and your sending domain has a page of its own.
You can change the mailbox names of those two addresses, but not their domain. The catch-all switch is described under Catch-all addresses, below. The two things you might expect here and will not find are elsewhere for the same reason: they are facts about your store rather than about the way it sends. Your From name and your store address are on Store settings, where they are yours from your first day. Your sending domain signs your texts' links as well as your email, so it has a page of its own next door — Settings → Domain, with a chapter of its own in this guide.
Before your domain is confirmed
Most of this page appears once your own domain is set up and the email provider has confirmed it, and until then the page says which of those two you are waiting on. Whether there is anything left for you to do depends on which of them it is, and the page says which.
What you can set while you wait depends on whether you have been here before. A store setting up for the first time sees this one sentence and nothing else: the reply address and the typefaces appear with the rest of the page, and until then your emails use the ones every store starts with. A store that uninstalled and came back keeps all of it — your reply address and your typefaces were never thrown away — so you get the whole page, and the waiting is said inside Your sending addresses, about the addresses alone:
Your sending addresses appear here once your domain is set up.
Your From name and your store address are on Store settings either way, and they are yours from your first day.
If you have not started, the page points you at the page that starts it:
Your sending settings appear here once your domain is set up.
If a setup is under way — whether the records are still waiting to be published or the provider is checking ones you published this morning — it says so instead, because that is a different thing to know, and it points you at the page where the rest of it happens:
Your domain is being set up on Settings → Domain. Your sending settings appear here once the email provider confirms it.
And if a setup stopped — it did not finish, or the records it needs never arrived — Settings → Domain holds whatever you published and the reason:
Your domain setup did not finish. Your sending settings appear here once it does.
Reply-to address
Where a reply goes when somebody answers one of your emails. It is filled in from the contact address your Shopify store publishes.
Leave it empty and replies go to an address nobody reads. The address your email is sent from is a technical one, set up for your store; nothing is watching it. This is the field that decides where a customer who hits Reply actually reaches you, so it is worth setting.
Your store's two typefaces
Your emails are set in two typefaces: a body typeface for the words, and a heading typeface for headings. Pick them once here and every new template starts in them, so your email looks like your store without you setting it on every block.
The heading typeface can follow the body one, and that is where it starts. Leave it set to "Follow the body typeface" and every heading matches the words around it, which is a real design and not a gap. Choose a different one and new headings start in it — a serif heading over a sans body, or the other way around, is the oldest pairing there is.
Each face is shown in itself. Open either menu and every typeface writes its own name in its own shapes, with your store's name under it in the same face — so you are choosing what your email will look like rather than choosing a word. Your store's name comes from the Store name on Store settings — the same name your unsubscribe page prints, so the two can never disagree. If what you read under the faces is not what you want people to see, that is the box to fix.
Anywhere you have deliberately chosen a different typeface stays as you set it. Changing either of these does not sweep through templates you have already written and overwrite choices you made on purpose. It sets what a new template begins with, and it is what any block you never touched is shown in.
In the template editor the same list appears on a text block and on a heading, with your store's own face at the top of it so you can always see which one is yours — your body face on a paragraph, your heading face on a heading.
Why the list is short. These are faces we chose because every inbox already has them. A person opening your email might be in Gmail on a laptop, in Outlook at work, or on their phone, and each of those draws the words in a face the device itself carries. Choosing from faces that are everywhere is what makes what you design and what your reader sees the same thing, in a hundred different email apps, rather than a design that quietly becomes something else on the way.
Match my theme
Match my theme reads the typefaces your online store's theme uses and shows you the closest match from the list — one for the body, one for headings. Nothing changes until you save it.
Nothing changes until you say so. The button reads your theme and puts what it found on screen; you decide whether to use it, and then you save it like any other change on this page. Your body typeface is what every template you have already written is set in, so it never moves without you having read what it would move to.
If your theme's font is not one of ours, you are told that. A theme can use any font a web page can, and most of those are not faces an inbox has. When that happens the match names the closest of our six rather than pretending it found your exact one — so you can take it, or pick something else yourself.
Changing your typefaces does not change anything about your Shopify store or your theme.
The addresses your email comes from
Your sending addresses is the card that holds them. Two boxes — Marketing mailbox name and Order and account mailbox name — hold the part of each address before the @. They start as hello and orders on your own domain, and both are yours to change:
Change the name before the @ to anything you like — it needs no new setup and nothing has to be published. Nobody has to read either mailbox: where a reply goes is your Reply-to address, above.
Each box holds the name, not the whole address. Under them, a line each says the whole thing as you type it, so you can read what an inbox will show before you save — Marketing emails come from news@yourdomain.com.
A mailbox name is letters, numbers, dots, dashes and underscores. No spaces, no @, and dots have to sit inside the name rather than at either end or two in a row — news.letter is fine, news. and .news and ne..ws are not. Type something else and that box's line says so — about the box, not about your store, whose addresses are untouched by a name you are still typing — with the rule under both of them, in the same words the save would use:
Use letters, numbers, dots, dashes and underscores — no spaces, no dot at the start or end, and no two dots in a row.
There is a ceiling too, and it is generous enough that you are unlikely to meet it — 64 characters before the @, which is the longest any email address is allowed. A name past it is refused with its own sentence rather than the one above, so you are never told about full stops when the only thing wrong is length:
That mailbox name is too long. Use 64 characters or fewer before the @.
And an empty box says that it is empty, for the same reason.
Capital letters are not a mistake: what you type is saved in lower case, so News and news are one address, and the line under the box shows you the lower-case one because that is the one your email will come from.
The part after the @ is not a box, and that is not something waiting to be built. Your email is signed, so inbox providers can tell it is really from you rather than from somebody pretending to be you — and the signature belongs to your domain:
These are signed, so inbox providers can tell your email is really from you. The signature belongs to the domain, so the part after the @ cannot be typed over — a different domain could not be signed and would not be delivered.
Under that sentence is a See your domain button, which is where the other half is set.
A mailbox name is named by none of the records you published, which is why renaming one costs you nothing: news@yourdomain.com is signed exactly as hello@yourdomain.com was, the moment you save it.
Both boxes appear once your own domain is set up, and the card carries a button to Settings → Domain, where the other half is set.
Frequency limit
Your store's frequency limit is the shortest gap between two marketing emails to the same person, whatever sent them. It starts at 4 hours.
Applies to campaigns and automations. An email that would arrive sooner waits its turn. A change applies to everyone, including emails already waiting.
An owner or a manager can change it. The switch beside Frequency limit enables or disables it. While it is on, Minimum time between marketing emails to the same person is a number and a unit: type the number, then choose hours or days. Hours go from 1 to 168 and days from 1 to 7, so a week is the longest gap. A number outside that range, or one that is not a whole number, is refused with a line under the box saying the range, and nothing is saved. A gap that is a whole number of days is shown in days; any other is shown in hours. Disabling the limit keeps the gap you chose, so enabling it again puts it back. It is saved with the rest of the page.
A change applies to your whole store at once, including people already waiting. Disable the limit and nobody waits on it any more — anyone it was holding back is free to go at once. Shorten the gap and each of them goes when the new gap has passed since their last marketing email, not the old one. Lengthening the gap, or enabling the limit, moves nobody who is already waiting — it applies from their next email. A marketer and a viewer see the same number and unit, grayed out, with a Manager or owner label beside the heading.
A single campaign, or a single send step in an automation, can be told to ignore the limit; everything else keeps to it.
The "Email me" box at checkout
Shopify's checkout has its own "Email me with news and offers" box, and a tick in it reaches us as consent. Its wording lives in your store's theme, so publishing a different theme or updating yours can put Shopify's default back.
The Checkout sign-up wording card shows what the box says right now, read from your live theme, and offers a clearer line you can copy: "Email me with exclusive offers, new arrivals and news." Press the copy button in the corner of that line, then:
- Press Open checkout settings, under the steps on the card.
- Under Marketing opt-in → Email, make sure the box is shown at checkout (for example Checkout only), then press the pencil beside the box's wording — "Email me with news and offers", unless you changed it.
- Paste the wording into Accept email marketing checkbox label.
- Press Save in the Unsaved changes bar at the top.
Use Chrome for this step. In Safari, Shopify's editor does not show the Save button right now.
Or write your own — this box has no rules to follow. There is no code involved, and Shopify does not let apps change this wording, so the paste is yours to do.
Whether the box starts ticked is Shopify's setting, not ours. In Shopify, go to Settings → Checkout → Marketing options → Preselect the sign-up option, where you can choose it by region.
The "Text me" box beside it is different: carriers expect a short disclosure there, so we watch that one for you. The Text messages help page explains it.
If sending is paused for your store
Very rarely we pause a store's sending while we look into something, and Settings → Email says so in a line above the settings. Only the sending stops; nothing on the page is locked.
Where a reply goes and both typefaces are still yours to change, as are your From name and store address on Store settings, and your domain setup is untouched. The When sending is paused help page says why it happens and how to get sending back.
Catch-all addresses
One switch on Settings → Email decides what happens when somebody who browsed your store signs up with an address whose mailbox cannot be checked. On, they are accepted and you can email them; off, they wait until an order confirms them.
The card is headed:
Catch-all addresses
It is on when you start, and it is one of the ways you shape your deliverability. Some email domains accept mail to any name at all, so a mailbox on them cannot be checked; this decides what happens when somebody who browsed your store then signs up with one of those addresses. Either way their consent is recorded and they are thanked like everybody else. The switch covers your back-in-stock form too: while it is on, a shopper with one of those addresses who asks to be told when something is back gets that email when it is; disable it and they do not, including anyone already waiting.
Under the switch are two numbers — how many profiles the rule has accepted, and how many of those have bounced since — to be read as a pair.
An owner or a manager can enable and disable it. A marketer and a viewer see the switch and the numbers, and cannot change them. The whole story, including what counts as browsing, is on the What a form collects help page under Catch-all addresses.