Email Authentication based on Client Domain

Take my money!

This is a concern for me as well. To sum up reading through the biggest relevant threads here, the current solutions seem to be:

1. Do nothing, many of Shipstation's customer notification emails will go to spam because the from address looks like it is spoofed (like spam emails do) to anti-spam systems. 
2. Remove your email address in your Shipstation email settings so the "from" address on shipping emails will show as shipping@shipstation. However then if customers reply to shipping notification emails you will never know.
3. Disable Shipstation emails altogether and use a different solution, such as a Wordpress plugin if you are using Woocommerce. It seems like you have to pay a subsciption for shipping/tracking notification email plugins for Woocommerce though? (Can anyone recommend good free solutions?)
4. Someone mentioned adding specific CNAME records to your DNS settings in your webhost in one of the threads:
   • I believe this essentially adds shipstation's email server to your website domain's approved emails, but I'm not knowledgeable enough to know the ins and outs of this or if this is good practice. This seems like the most promising to actually get the correct functionality all around, but I think what they posted may have been specific to their domain and store and I haven't seen anyone else talking about this path. If this is a solution, Shipstation needs to create a knowledgebase article on what records to add.

Am I missing anything?

@SuperMgr-SarahIf I can make a suggestion to temporarily solve this problem: give us an option to send mail from your tracking@shipstation.com (like what happens when we leave the email address out of our branding settings) and instead send the emails with a reply to address. This way the emails will not fail DMARC but we still get the replies from our customers.

@lanbosmilsim the problem is, at least with our customers, is they very often reply to the delivery emails with questions, problems, etc. If it's sent from shipstation, it should be sent from "noreply@shipstation" and replies to it should bounce back to the customer.

@Manager-Erintagging you for my previous post since it appears @SuperMgr-Sarah has been offline for over a month. Hoping to get some sort of resolution on this. I just found you guys and literally everything BUT email is amazing...email is horrible. I'm not sure I can throw in with you guys if the email can't be figured out. No matter how much I try to instruct customers otherwise, they ALWAYS reply to the shipping notification emails.

@HHEbut if the email is sent from tracking@shipstation.com and has a reply-to email address for your actual store email, then when they reply it will go to your email instead of tracking@shipstation.com. Problem solved. It still won't look like it came from you@store.com but the replies will at least go to you@store.com instead of bouncing back from tracking@shipstation.com.

@lanbosmilsim true! The real problem though, is that we are having this discussion 7.5 years after the issue was reported to ShipStation. 

@HHE  If we're being completely honest, this thread alone almost made me abandon shipstation altogether. I'm still on the fence. I use zen cart and the recent update Stamps.com made when USPS Ground Advantage came out earlier this month broke my ability to postback tracking info and their support cannot figure out the problem. So I found shipstation and everything works perfectly...except this email issue. As a programmer myself, I know just how easy it would be to implement my temporary solution. Requires no DNS modifications of any kind for them or for us. It would literally just be a programming change to add the reply-to info into each email sent. Again, it's not a perfect solution like you have with almost EVERY other place that sends emails on your behalf, but it would at least solve delivery AND reply issues.

I'd really like to see this feature, we are currently programming a replacement to this, which takes time and resources since Shipstation can't accommodate this in over 7 years. Email deliverability is more important than ever and customers like their delivery and confirmation emails. 

The lack of this ability is the main reason why I’m actively looking for an alternative to ShipStation. I get angry emails regularly from people who don’t check their spam folder first. Emails go there because of the lack of authentication. It’s really a slap in the face that it has been ignored for this long

Its honestly stunning that this issue hasn't been rectified given the time frame.

Gmail and Yahoo have recently announced they're further tightening up their spam protection and others will follow suit.  Given that a large number of my shipping notifications (that I send on behalf of artists whose stores I run) end up in peoples spam folders already this is very worrying.

Please address this ShipStation!

Only years of requests and 14 pages of requests in this thread. Can't be that important right? Hmm.

@Manager-Erin is anyone at SS looking at this thread? I see it was changed to "investigating" at some point but is there anything that can be done to update the people in the thread who have been posting for almost 8 years? 

Even a response of "we aren't planning to do anything about this" would be better than no response at all.

Anyone find a solution? Been back and forth with support for about 3 weeks with no resolution. 

We did find that it's only an issue when the email address is from our domain. If we use a gmail or any other email it works fine and customers get their tracking emails. 

Like everyone else, leaving it blank is not an option for us because customers always reply to it and we'll never see it. 

Depending on your platform that is feeding Shipstation (in my case WooCommerce), I use a shipment tracking plugin on the other side that inserts the tracking number and also altu sends an email update on the order with tracking, so I just have SS sent to NONE for shipment notifications.  You may have to work around it.

Also look into ZAPIER to have a SS trigger, pull the tracking data and automate a new email on your own using your own authenticated sources.  the SS platform is very nice except for thie ONE ongoing, and never ending issue they can't seem to understand emails need to be authenticated now.  This is not NEW>

@Shipping55 what tracking plugin do you use for Woocommerce?

I might try this method for now, but to any Shipstation devs reading this... there's no reason users of your shipping platform should be needing to troubleshoot and find workarounds for something as simple as shipment tracking emails from your shipping service. This continues to be a major issue.

@shipshipper 

we use this one 

https://woo.com/products/shipment-tracking/

once the shipping in for us passed over by SS, the “order completed” email in WC includes the tracking info.  Simple and effective and then your still sending emails from WC (assuming you’re using an SMTP plugin to route those via an authenticated server) 

I agree we should not have to do workarounds.  EVERY third party company that sends emails on your behalf supports authenticated messages. MailChimp, Brevo, active campaign, the list goes on because it’s pretty much a requirement now. 

The cynic in me says -

Maybe ShipStation doesn't want to implement this "makes total sense" solution from a retailers perspective because they want the "@shipstation.com" emails out there to help their brand at our expense.

After reading this issue comment thread, we are actively looking for a replacement to SS at this point. If this hasn't been resolved at this point, 7 years from it appearing, it never will be. In our experience, companies who don't fix the issue or don't respond with a timeline of when it will be fixed are too big, could care less, and better solutions on the market exist.

I mean, here is how Klaviyo fixes this issue SS. This isn't rocket science and should be totally possible if your provider is sendgrid: https://help.klaviyo.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000357752

Considering this year authentication is now a requirement from Google and Yahoo to deliver Mail....you'd think this can't go ignored anymore....

Yes I just read that notice, in February 2024 it looks like no Shipstation emails will be delivered to anyone with a Google or Yahoo email address.

(Unless you leave the from address blank. But then customers that reply to those emails will never have their message delivered to you...)

That's like 90% of customers left wondering if their order has shipped because the shipping service we pay for has no solution for authenticated email still in 2024. Mind boggling.

ShipStation is now officially on a time limit. Either finally provide proper sender authentication, or disable branded emails entirely.

They have clearly been too focused on redesigning the UI again. They waste time developing almost pointless features that never get fleshed out enough to be truly useful outside of the most basic situations. They don't even have proper error handling / data validation on the order data input fields. It is possible to generate an order that you cannot ship with USPS, because the order name contains invalid characters. I have done it more than once when setting up batch shipments.

ShipStation, this should be a wakeup call. Get your act together. Prioritize the actually useful and important things instead of wasting time on another UI overhaul.

Hello amazing community members, 

While I don't have any specific updates about movement on this, I can tell you that this is not being ignored. This is being discussed internally and we are very aware of  the new authentication requirements and it's potential implications for all of our users. 

As soon as there is more information I will make sure it is shared on this thread as well. 

-Erin: Your Friendly ShipStation Community Manager 

With the greatest of respect to the lovely people at ShipStation this has not been a short time coming.  Its been an issue on the horizon for quite some time and many many other companies have managed to introduce solutions.  The deadline is in 10 days and then everything stops working!!