Does Shopify Include Business Email? What You Get, What You Do Not, and What 29 Real Stores Run

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You set up a store on Shopify, you own the domain, and you want hello@yourbrand.com to work. The short answer is that Shopify does not give you a mailbox. Its own help page says plainly that Shopify does not offer email hosting. What it does give you is smaller than a mailbox, and larger than most people expect once you count the emails your store sends on its own.

This guide separates the three different jobs that get lumped together as “business email”, shows what Shopify covers for each, and adds something I could measure: what 29 well-known Shopify stores actually run on their own domains, taken from public DNS on 17 October 2026. Facts about Shopify come from its help pages (email hosting and forwarding, setting up your email, and email rewrites). The numbers in the survey are my own lookups.

Three jobs, and Shopify covers only part of two

Job	What Shopify gives you	What you still need
Receive mail sent to hello@yourbrand.com	Free forwarding, on a domain that Shopify manages	A real inbox somewhere else to forward to
Reply from hello@yourbrand.com	Nothing	Third-party email hosting
Send order confirmations and shipping notices as hello@yourbrand.com	The sending itself, if the domain is authenticated	DNS records, and a DMARC record

Most confusion comes from treating these as one thing. A store can send tidy branded order emails and still have no way to read a customer’s reply.

What Shopify’s forwarding actually does

If you bought the domain through Shopify or transferred it there, you can create an unlimited number of forwarding addresses for free, from Settings, then Domains, then the Email forwarding section. Each address can forward to only one destination. Forwarding is one direction: replies to a forwarded message go out from your destination address, not from your custom one. To reply as hello@yourbrand.com you need a hosting service for that domain.

Two limits are worth knowing before you rely on it. Providers that enforce DKIM cannot be used as destinations, and Shopify names AOL and Yahoo as examples, so forward to a Gmail or Outlook inbox instead. And forwarding addresses cannot be created in the Shopify admin for a domain registered elsewhere. In that case your registrar may offer forwarding, or you can transfer the domain.

Shopify also recommends an SPF record to help forwarded mail arrive. The value on its forwarding page is v=spf1 include:_spf.hostedemail.com ~all, added as a TXT record with the name @. If your domain already has an SPF record, a domain can publish only one, so you would merge this into the existing record instead of adding a second line. How SPF records and the 10-lookup limit work explains what merging costs you.

What 29 Shopify stores run on their own domains

To see what real stores do, I picked 43 well-known direct-to-consumer brand domains and kept the ones whose main address or www name points to Shopify’s storefront servers (the 23.227.38.x range, or a CNAME to myshopify.com). That left 30. I dropped kithnyc.com because it duplicates kith.com, which leaves 29. For each I looked up the MX, SPF and DMARC records through Google’s public DNS service. These are large, established brands, so treat the numbers as what mature stores do, not as a sample of the average small shop.

Where mail to the domain is handled (MX record)	Stores	Examples
Google Workspace	17	Glossier, Huel, Rothy’s, Kith
Microsoft 365	5	Allbirds, Stanley
Something else, mostly a security gateway in front of the mailbox	7	Gymshark (Proofpoint), Brooklinen (Mimecast), Skims (Cisco)

Not one of the 29 relies on Shopify forwarding as its main setup, and none publishes the forwarding SPF value from Shopify’s help page. All of them run a real mail service, and 22 of 29 (about three in four) use Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. The seven in the third row are less clear-cut than they look. A gateway such as Proofpoint or Mimecast inspects mail first and then hands it to a mailbox service behind it, so the MX record tells you the gateway, not the provider of the mailboxes.

The records also show how much sending happens beyond the mailbox. Ten of the 29 publish SPF records with four to seven include: terms, authorising outside services such as Klaviyo, Mailgun, SendGrid, Zendesk and Salesforce. Receiving mail is the simple half. The sending half is where a growing store collects DNS records.

On DMARC, 11 of the 29 publish a policy of reject, 7 publish quarantine, and 11 publish none, which monitors without blocking anything. Every one has a DMARC record of some kind. If you want to see what a policy does when mail fails it, this guide on reading a DMARC rejection walks through the bounce.

One detail stood out. Seven of the 29 (BruMate, Hismile, Native, Peak Design, Rothy’s, Taylor Stitch and Ugmonk) still have include:shops.shopify.com in their SPF record. That is the older way of authorising Shopify’s notification mail, and plenty of setup guides still recommend it. Shopify’s current page says the CNAME records you add when you authenticate your domain handle SPF automatically for your sender address, so a separate SPF entry is not needed for them. I cannot tell from outside whether those seven stores need the include for another reason, so this is an observation, not an accusation.

Adding real email hosting to a Shopify domain

If the domain is managed by Shopify and you want Google Workspace or Zoho Mail, the admin has a direct route. In your provider’s console, verify the domain and copy the code it gives you (a TXT code or meta tag for Google, the Unique Code under Domains and General for Zoho). Then in Shopify go to Settings, then Domains, pick the domain and, in the Email forwarding section, choose Switch to email hosting. Pick the provider, paste the code and save, then go back to the provider and finish.

For any other provider on a Shopify-managed domain, you add the DNS records it specifies, using Edit DNS settings. For a domain that lives at another DNS host, you verify it with the provider, add the provider’s records there and connect the domain to Shopify.

The MX record is what sends mail to the new provider. For Google Workspace, Google’s current instructions use a single value, smtp.google.com, with priority 1, and tell you to delete any other MX records on the domain, because old or wrong ones can break delivery. Accounts created before 2023 may still use the older aspmx values, which Google says remain supported. In my survey, only 1 of the 17 Google stores (4ocean) uses the single record on its own, Huel lists it alongside the older five, and the other 15 still show only the older set.

Shopify warns that forwarding you configured on the domain is affected once MX records are added, so set up the replacement first and test with a message from an outside account before you deactivate anything. Propagation can take up to 48 hours according to Shopify, and Google allows up to 72. The existing guides for Google Workspace DKIM and Microsoft 365 SPF, DKIM and DMARC cover the authentication that should follow.

If you only need mailboxes and the domain is registered elsewhere, the cheapest route is often a web hosting plan that includes email, since you do not need a separate email product. The mailboxes for veravix.com itself run on Hostinger, and that works fine for a few addresses. It does not replace Google Workspace if you want shared calendars and heavy collaboration.

The sender trap: store+123@shopifyemail.com

This is the one that surprises store owners. If you set your Sender email in Shopify to an address on your own domain, but the domain is not authenticated, Shopify rewrites the From address on your customer emails to store+123@shopifyemail.com, with a number unique to your store. Customers then see that address instead of yours. Shopify says the rewrite happens because, since 1 February 2024, Gmail and Yahoo require the sending domain to be authenticated and to have a DMARC record.

Shopify’s page lists what avoids it:

1. Add the CNAME records shown in your admin when you authenticate the domain. You must add every record shown, because the number varies. They cover DKIM and SPF, and adding them requires an active paid plan.
2. Add a DMARC record at _dmarc, at minimum v=DMARC1; p=none. Automatic authentication sets up the CNAMEs but does not add DMARC for you.
3. Keep only one DMARC record. Two records cause validation to fail and can bring the rewrite back.
4. If your DMARC record contains adkim=s or aspf=s, Shopify recommends changing them to r (relaxed), because strict alignment can block authentication.

Domains bought through Shopify are authenticated automatically, including DMARC, and Shopify says Cloudflare, GoDaddy and IONOS domains can be set up automatically too. Other registrars need the manual steps. Removing the CNAMEs later can cause bounces, and Shopify then resets the sender to the shopifyemail.com address until you restore them.

A practical point about forwarding addresses: Shopify says only a Shopify-managed domain can use a forwarding address as the sender email, and advises against “no-reply” style names because some mail hosts reject them. Customers who reply to a branded order email will reach whatever mailbox your sender address forwards to, so make sure someone reads it.

Which route fits which store

• Just starting, one address, tight budget: Shopify forwarding to a Gmail inbox, plus the CNAME and DMARC records for sending. Replies will come from the Gmail address, so accept that for now.
• You want to reply as your brand: real hosting. Google Workspace or Zoho Mail connect directly from the Shopify admin on a Shopify-managed domain.
• Several tools send mail as your domain (marketing, support desk, shipping): expect to publish and maintain a longer SPF record, keep DKIM for each sender, and move DMARC towards enforcement over time. The survey shows that mature stores end up here.

Whichever you pick, test it from the outside. Send a message to each address from an account other than your forwarding inbox, and send an order notification to a Gmail address you control and check the From line. A deliverability test done properly covers what a passing result does and does not prove.