RevAI

Setting up email

Email is optional. Vereli works on SMS alone — but email reaches customers who never left a phone number, which is most of them.

You can set this up any time, from the last onboarding step or from Settings. It does not hold up going live.

The one thing that surprises people

You cannot send from a Gmail, Outlook or Bigpond address. Not a Vereli limitation — nobody can, including every other app that sends email for you.

Sending email as yourstore@gmail.com means proving you control gmail.com, which you don't. Google does. Since Gmail and Yahoo began enforcing sender authentication, mail that can't prove where it came from is spam-foldered or rejected outright.

What you do instead: send from a domain you own — your shop's domain works — and put your Gmail address in "Replies go to". Your customer sees your store's address in their inbox, and when they reply it lands in the inbox you actually read. Nothing needs to change about how you read email.

Setting it up

  1. Domain you send from. Use a subdomain of your shop's domain, like recovery.yourstore.com.au. A subdomain is better than the root domain: it keeps recovery mail separate from your Shopify order confirmations, so a problem with one can't affect the other.

  2. Mailbox name. hello, shop, whatever suits. This makes the full address — hello@recovery.yourstore.com.au.

  3. Name customers see. Your store name.

  4. Replies go to. Any address at all, including Gmail. Use the inbox you actually read — if the sending subdomain has no mailbox behind it, replies sent there go nowhere.

  5. Add the DNS records Vereli shows you, wherever you manage your domain — usually your domain registrar or wherever your website is hosted.

    One of them is an MX record, and it will look alarming if you already have email on your domain. It is not. It sits on the subdomain you chose (recovery.yourstore.com.au), not on your main domain, so your existing email is untouched. It is what lets customer replies reach Vereli instead of disappearing.

  6. Click "I've added the records." Usually verified within a few minutes, occasionally up to a day.

Things that commonly go wrong

"It's been hours and it still says not verified." DNS changes can take time to propagate. If it's been more than 24 hours, the records usually have a typo — check them character by character, especially the long DKIM value.

"My domain host added the domain name to the record automatically." A common one. Some hosts append your domain to whatever you type, so recovery._domainkey becomes recovery._domainkey.yourstore.com.au and then gets your domain appended again. If the record looks doubled up, that's why.

"I don't have a domain." Then email isn't available to you yet. SMS works without one, and a domain costs about $15/year if you want to add email later.

What Vereli sends as

Once verified, recovery emails come from you, not from Vereli. Your store is the sender of record — the same position you're in for SMS. Vereli never sends customer marketing from its own domain, because the consent your customer gave was to you.