Email and the inbox
The three kinds of mail your store sends, the shared inbox, and connecting a mailbox of your own.
Your store has its own email address from the day it is created, it can both send and receive, and the conversations land in Dashboard → Inbox. You do not have to set any of that up.
Your address is your store's name at eCrate's mail domain, and you can see it at Settings → Email.
Three kinds of mail, and why the difference matters
| Kind | Examples | Metered? |
|---|---|---|
| Transactional | Order receipts, shipping notices, password resets | Never |
| Conversation | Your replies from the inbox | Never |
| Marketing | Campaigns and automated flows | Above a free allowance |
The split is not billing pedantry. It decides how a message is sent, and mixing them is how stores get their mail blocked — which is why eCrate will not let you.
The inbox
Mail to your store address arrives in the inbox, threaded into conversations, and linked to the customer record it came from where eCrate can recognise the address. Mail from someone you have never sold to is still kept and still threaded.
Attachments are real files and go into your media library, so you can reuse them. There are ceilings — 5 MB a file, 15 MB a message, 10 files a message — and a file that breaks one is shown in the thread with the reason it was dropped. The message itself is always kept.
Using your own mailbox
Connecting your own Gmail or Zoho mailbox is not switched on for this eCrate. Your store sends and receives on its own eCrate address, which is what everything above describes.
Bounces and complaints
When a message hard-bounces — the address does not exist — eCrate stops emailing that customer entirely, receipts included. A soft bounce (a full mailbox, a temporary failure) stops nothing, because a full mailbox is not a dead one.
When someone marks a message as spam, they stop receiving marketing only. They still get their receipts, because they are still a customer.
Neither is reversible from the dashboard by design.
Campaigns and flows
Marketing → Campaigns sends to a segment you choose. Marketing → Flows sends automatically on a trigger — a welcome after a first order, a nudge after an abandoned cart.
An abandoned-cart flow only counts a cart the shopper genuinely left behind, and a flow never emails somebody who has opted out.
Sending from your own domain
Your store's email address is separate from your storefront's web address. Connecting a custom domain does not change where your mail comes from. See Using your own domain.