Google Workspace Business Emails & Miva: Do they play nicely?

[SidFeyDesigns]

I'm not sure if this is the right place to post , so please feel free to move this if needed.

Thinking about switching to Google Workspace for the business email for loveisarose dot com. There have been a lot of issues with the current email hosting but the biggest being Miva's merchant order emails are not reliably getting through to the inbox. Getting these emails are cruicial since that is what is printed to put the order into production/fulfillment.

Anyways, I was wondering if any fellow Miva users/stores are using Google Workspace for their business emails ([email protected])?

If so, do you have any feedback(positive or negative)?
Was it easy to set up and get Miva emails working?
Were there any hurdles with intial set up?
Any issues with deliverability?
Any issues with spam protection and security?

Thank you in advance for any input.

[ILoveHostasaurus]

Hi Nick, please shoot me an email dhubbard at miva about this if you'd like to investigate the current delivery issues before any email changes occur.

Independent of that, we typically recommend either Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 to customers looking for email service recommendations. Both are great for availability, storage, price, spam filtering. I'd say Microsoft has the edge if you intend to use Outlook along with the service, as I find that pairing to have benefits over Google + mail software. If you're all web-based email, probably just go with the interface you find more appealing / efficient.

Please keep in mind that you should not use either provider for transactional emails from your store, and in fact won't be able to for much longer. Google is discontinuing access to SMTP-based email sending on Sept 30, and Microsoft has already incorporated a 10 second delay into SMTP transactions to discourage transactional use, so it would not surprise me if they ultimately block it as well. Either way, the current Microsoft setup is inappropriate to use for a Miva Merchant store since it adds greatly to the time a checkout takes to complete.

We have alternative methods of email sending for store usage, which solve both that problem and typically delivery issues as well. Happy to discuss with you.

[ids]

David,

Can you supply some specifics/example of what you mean by "transactional?"
I have an idea what you might mean, but, too easy to misunderstand.

Thanks,

Scott

[ILoveHostasaurus]

Transactional emails are event-driven messages sent by software, such as Miva Merchant or modules/custom code within it, rather than human to human communication email. So, order notifications, password resets, marketing, two factor auth, etc. Google is making changes to prevent such usage completely. Microsoft has made changes to make such usage perform extremely poorly. We deliver such messages ourselves for customers, however, we can also assist with very high performing alternatives that are likely to have a higher percentage of deliveries to the inbox vs spam folders.

[GDesigns]

David, what are those alternate options? A lot of our clients are using Google and MS at this point. Thanks for your insights.

[ILoveHostasaurus]

Hi Sabine, you will be able to tell if a given Miva Merchant store is sending through Microsoft by looking at the Domain Settings for the mail server. If it's some variation of smtp.office365.com or similar Microsoft domain names, it's likely both sending through them and encountering severe delays during checkout while emails are being sent. Those delays can increase the likelihood of failure if any other aspect of the checkout is also slow, such as payment authorization.

Sendgrid is probably the best (and also inexpensive) option to solve this, but we've found customers using a wide variety of services for marketing emails that often offer a free or add-on transactional email component, whether that's Sparkpost, mailchimp, etc. So we normally try to figure out if a customer has any options already in use that this need can piggyback on, and that checks the same boxes for DKIM, SPF, etc. to achieve fast and reliable delivery to inboxes vs spam folders, and go from there. If they do not have any of that, Sendgrid is fantastic and we can often do the entire setup on our side.

[lesliekirk]

I'm not sure if this is the right place to post , so please feel free to move this if needed.

Thinking about switching to Google Workspace for the business email for loveisarose dot com. There have been a lot of issues with the current email hosting but the biggest being Miva's merchant order emails are not reliably getting through to the inbox. Getting these emails are cruicial since that is what is printed to put the order into production/fulfillment.

Anyways, I was wondering if any fellow Miva users/stores are using Google Workspace for their business emails ([email protected])?

If so, do you have any feedback(positive or negative)?
Was it easy to set up and get Miva emails working?
Were there any hurdles with intial set up?
Any issues with deliverability?
Any issues with spam protection and security?

Thank you in advance for any input.

I switched to Google Workspace for my email since I'm not a big Microsoft user. For the most part, it has worked for what I need it to do. It works well with Thunderbird and Mail on my iPhone.

The odd thing is spam - I have to double-check the spam folder for authentication emails from some of my stores. It's not all of them but if I don't get that email right away, I've learned to check there. Without going into a lot of detail, there is also some bias in what it has been flagging as spam and what it is letting through. But it's not a business-related issue.

[ILoveHostasaurus]

I switched to Google Workspace for my email since I'm not a big Microsoft user. For the most part, it has worked for what I need it to do. It works well with Thunderbird and Mail on my iPhone.

The odd thing is spam - I have to double-check the spam folder for authentication emails from some of my stores. It's not all of them but if I don't get that email right away, I've learned to check there. Without going into a lot of detail, there is also some bias in what it has been flagging as spam and what it is letting through. But it's not a business-related issue.

When you see that occur, it's worth investigating with our support to confirm SPF is properly set up; that can direct things right to spam if not matched up with how sending is actually being performed. Mail sent through us will also not have DKIM support, but will when sent through third party services like Sendgrid, so that can play a role as well.