Records of the actual notifications/emails sent to customers

[JPQUAT]

How do we see the actual emails (order confirmation, refund notifications, etc) that are sent to customers? We have the exact timeline of comms with customers, but we really need to be able to see exactly what was sent to the customers.

I'm posting this as a new question since it was previously posted but went unanswered with people still commenting asking for a solution in 2023 (https://community.shopify.com/c/shopify-discussions/where-to-find-emails-sent-to-customer/td-p/38948...). @Gabe 

[Gabe]

Hey @JPQUAT 

Thanks for the question and I can see how you would benefit from a native E-Mail Hosting within Shopify. Such a system would allow things like threaded dialogues with customers in one place, seeing important info in the order timelines or customer pages, offering more feedback and support, as well as a consistent customer experience and CRM (e.g. all communications coming from same sender name / 'from' field). 

Have you tried our Shopify E-Mail feature which can cover a lot of the emailing for you? Or our Shopify Flow App with which you can create rules like sending copies to your own email? You can also offer an enhanced communication experience with a real-time chat on the homepage like with our native Shopify Inbox App which integrates with other Chat systems like Apple's chat and FB Messenger.

Essentially, Shopify doesn't offer email Hosting and Servers which would be necessary to store all the emails in incoming and outgoing email folders, which are sent from the core system and that you find in the settings area -> Notifications. 

One reason that Shopify doesn't offer E-Mail Hosting is that many Shops are opened and closed at a high rate and this would bring the issue of Data Protection i.e. storing a Shop's emails after the shop was cancelled or gone into a frozen state, especially, the customer replies to shop emails.

All E-Mails, especially those sent back as replies from customers, come under the heading of personal private data and therefore are considered to be very sensitive. This would therefore be a problematic issue if Shopify were to store both incoming and outgoing emails and customer replies. That is why we recommend to use a dedicated E-Mail Hosting service like Google Workspace or Zoho (more on that below) as these are specialised services that can also store private emails and data.

In the Notifications area in your settings you will however be able to configure which emails that are sent out from the system also go to your own email as a BCC (or even to your phone as an SMS) as you can see here:

If you connect a dedicated E-Mail Hosting Service to your store like google Workspace or Zoho then you can solve this issue and at the same time offer your customers a very professional CRM service.

However, as we and our developer teams do hear your epic needs, we are always looking to implement new solutions and you never know what will come your way in 2023! 

-----

Have you thought about Easter yet? Why not incorporate some "Easter Egg Gamification" into the store in the run-up to Easter? For example, you can show an announcement on the homepage that Easter eggs are hidden in the store and when they are found, they are automatically added to the cart as gifts. I'd be happy to chat more about this here if you are interested!

Let know if you have any other questions about the store and business and gladly we can discuss it further here! Please keep an eye out in your email for notifications about answers to your questions in the community.

[JPQUAT]

Hey Gabe, I'm not asking about an email hosting service to manage communications. I and many others (see linked thread in OP) simply want to be able to see the order confirmation that was sent to a customer, more so the data within the email such as delivery timings, etc which are subject to change. 

With regards to replies to the order confirmation, this could be kept and managed as it is now - we just need to see what was sent. 

[Gabe]

@JPQUAT 

Totally understand that and currently it will only be possible as a BCC to your own emails and phones as seen im my last image above in the settings for the order confirmation copies sent to the staff.

Hope that helps! 

[JPQUAT]

I've set this up, but it seems to send me a different notification, rather than BCC'ing me in the order confirmation?

[Gabe]

@JPQUAT 

In the above settings you can choose what staff members receive the order notification copies. If you choose to receive email notifications, you will receive notifications of both new orders and return requests. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed to see new orders for this store. The RSS Feed URL is the following:

• https://admin.shopify.com/store/[your_shop_name]/orders.rss 

[Marcwales]

Hi Gabe, 

You've missed the point completely of @JPQUAT question. It's not to see the internal emails which we already recieve, but the customer notification emails like order confirmation, order shipped...etc 

I cant' believe it's not possible in 2025 to BCC all the email notifications send to our customers. We have no log, no way to control if customer see the email, if it goes to spam, if dmarc is correct....etc. Just add the same option you have for internal email, a basic transfer email would already be a big advance in this system. The analytics part of it would be the next big step.... i guess this will take another 10 years 😉 

[Dotflakes]

That's a great question. I am looking for this answer for a long time. I have noticed that the customer order notification email preview doesn't reflect the exact email the customers receive.