How to Send Emails from Shopify Flow Using Zoho Mail

First, make sure the account can use SMTP at all. Zoho removed IMAP/SMTP access from its newer free plans, so a recently created free mailbox often can’t send through an external app no matter how it’s configured. If that’s your situation, you’ll need to move to a paid Mail plan or a Zoho Workspace subscription before the rest of this will work. Older free accounts and all paid accounts are fine.

Then decide which mailbox FlowRelay will authenticate as. A dedicated mailbox (something like [email protected]) is the tidy choice: it keeps automated mail out of a person’s inbox and lets you manage its password independently. Note the full email address, you’ll use it as both the SMTP username and, by default, the From address on your emails.

SMTP access is off by default on some Zoho account types, so turn it on for your mailbox first.

Log in to Zoho Mail on the web, open Settings, go to Mail Accounts, select the address you’ll send from, and enable IMAP Access (this is what unlocks external SMTP/IMAP for the account). Save.

If you’re an organization user, your admin may control whether IMAP/SMTP is allowed under the org’s email policies, so check with them if the option is greyed out or missing.

Zoho strongly encourages two-factor authentication (TFA), and SMTP can’t answer a TFA prompt. So if TFA is enabled on this account, your normal password won’t work, you need an application-specific password instead.

Sign in at accounts.zoho.com, go to Security → App Passwords, click to generate a new one, give it a name like “FlowRelay SMTP,” and copy the generated password. Use that as the SMTP password in the connect step.

Two related cases that also require an app password: if you sign in to Zoho through a federated login (Google, Microsoft, etc.) you have no native Zoho password, so you must generate one here; and organizations using SAML sign-in have to use an app password for SMTP as well.

Zoho’s SMTP host depends on two things: your account type and your data center region. Getting either wrong produces an authentication failure even when the password is correct, so it’s worth pinning down exactly.

Account type sets the hostname stem:

• smtp.zoho.com for personal/free accounts (addresses like @zoho.com or @zohomail.com)
• smtppro.zoho.com for paid business subscriptions sending from a custom domain ([email protected])

Data center region sets the top-level domain. The examples above are the US data center. If your account was created in another region, swap the ending accordingly, for example smtp.zoho.eu (Europe), smtp.zoho.in (India), smtp.zoho.com.au (Australia), with matching smtppro. variants for paid accounts. A US-server address will reject credentials from an EU-hosted account and vice versa.

The reliable way to get the exact value: in Zoho Mail → Settings → Mail Accounts → POP/IMAP, Zoho displays the precise server details for your specific account and data center. Use what it shows. The rest of the settings are:

• Port: 587 (TLS/STARTTLS) or 465 (SSL), either works
• Username: your full Zoho email address
• Password: your account password, or the app password from the previous step

Install FlowRelay from the Shopify App Store and accept the requested permissions.

On first launch, FlowRelay shows a short setup checklist: set your sender name and email, connect a provider, and send a test email. The next step covers connecting Zoho over SMTP.

In FlowRelay, open Settings, find Email delivery, and click Manage providers to open the Connect email provider dialog.

Pick SMTP from the provider list and fill in your Zoho details: the host for your account and region (from the previous step), port 587 (or 465), your full Zoho address as the username, and your account or app password. FlowRelay tests the connection before saving it, so the wrong host for your region, a missing app password, or SMTP still being disabled on the mailbox all show up immediately rather than after your first real send.

By default Zoho sends mail as the address you authenticated with. If you want emails to go out under a different name or address, open Override sender and fill those in, but Zoho will only allow a From address that matches the authenticated account or one of its aliases (see the common issues below).

Click Connect. Whichever provider you connect first becomes your Primary, and FlowRelay routes all outbound mail through it. You can connect a second provider later as an automatic Fallback, which is worth doing here since a Zoho Mail mailbox has a daily sending limit you could hit at volume.

Open Shopify Flow, create a new workflow, and pick a trigger (Order created is a common one to start with). Add the Send transactional email action; it shows up in the action list once FlowRelay is installed.

You’ll need to fill in a few fields on the action: an email address for the recipient (this can pull straight from the trigger, like the customer’s email), a subject line, and the body, which is the actual HTML content of the email. There’s also an optional preview text field for the snippet shown in inbox previews. For the body, you can write plain HTML or use Liquid to pull in order details, customer names, and other data from the workflow.

Save the workflow and turn it on.

Before you trust a live trigger, use the Send test email button in FlowRelay’s settings. It confirms your Zoho connection is wired up correctly and shows you where the message lands.

Once that test email arrives, run your Flow workflow under real conditions, like placing a test order, and check FlowRelay’s delivery log to confirm the email went out and see its delivery status.