When order confirmations go to spam, the instinct is to rewrite the email. That is almost never the cause. Receivers decide mostly on identity and reputation, and only then on content.
Check in this order
- Authentication — SPF, DKIM and DMARC. If any of these fails, nothing else you do will help. Fix it first.
- Sender domain — sending as your-shop@gmail.com through Shopify looks like impersonation to receivers. Use an address on your own domain.
- Domain age and volume — a domain that has never sent mail and suddenly sends a thousand messages looks like a spam campaign. Volume should grow gradually.
- Blocklists — one incident, often from a shared server, can list your sending IP. MailMedic checks the major lists.
- Content — only now. Excessive images, link shorteners, and single-image emails with no text genuinely hurt.
The Shopify-specific trap
Shopify sends transactional mail on your behalf. If your SPF record does not include Shopify's servers, every order confirmation fails authentication — while any mail you send by hand from the same domain arrives fine. That difference confuses people for weeks. It is the single most common finding in a MailMedic scan.
Test with more than one provider. Gmail, Outlook and a corporate mail server make different decisions, and a message that reaches one may still be filtered by another.
Did this answer your question?If anything here was wrong, unclear or out of date, tell us — the article gets fixed the same day.
Related articles
