To reach out to your online store customers by email, you can use the standard settings enabled in the admin panel by default. You can review or alter email settings in the Settings → General settings → Email settings section of your website administration page.
In a typical scenario of using the email server provided by the hosting service, all you need to do is specify the sender’s email address and the sender’s name.
All the checkboxes must remain unselected. Do not use any of the fields below. To prevent the emails from your online store from being filtered as spam:
Make sure to use a real email address. You can use [email protected] or any other name of your choice;
Sender name for letters field must be filled;
The email address must not contain any Cyrillic characters.
To reduce the probability of your emails being treated as spam, check out the following tips for your domain:
If you want to receive feedback from your customers, specify a valid email address in Email Reply-to for orders which may be different from Email for letters.
You can also specify an email address whose domain name differs from the domain name of your online store.
If in doubt, just use the SMTP server settings. Fill in all the fields in Email Settings section including the password (see the example on the screenshot below).
Example of Gmail settings
Remember that SMTP Password field requires your app password, not the one to your Google account. See Google Account Help for the instructions on how to create your app password. Here is what an app password looks like: Screenshot 1, Screnshot 2.
If you have got all the Gmail SMTP credentials right, but your emails still don’t go through, go to https://support.google.com/mail/?p=BadCredentials and follow the instructions below:
If you use two-factor authentication to protect your Google account, you can create an app password and use it instead of your main one.
Allow less secure apps access to your account.
Check the access to your account. At this point Google also recommends that you create an app password.
Before following the steps below, make sure that you are logged into your browser under just one account that you want to enable permissions for. If you are not able to log out from other Google/G Suite accounts temporarily and leave only one active session, use the Incognito mode in your browser.
Common mistakes in email settings
Gmail was unable to verify the sender
This error may occur if you have specified an email address (e.g. a Gmail account) in Email Settings section of the general settings in the control panel, but you haven't followed all the steps that we mentioned earlier (see the examples above). In this case, Gmail directs messages to the Spam folder after being unable to verify that the sender is [email protected].
You should consider stating your valid email in the email settings to enable your customers to send replies to your emails regarding their orders, which you could reply to as well. If you specify an email address in the [email protected] format and keep the default settings, your customers will have the ability to reply to your emails, but you will not be able to do the same. Gmail server will also alert the recipient that the message was not encrypted by the domain. Therefore, if you want to enable encryption for your emails and make sure they don't go into the Spam folder, you must set up a third-party SMPT server for your outgoing mail and use SSL encryption.