Receipts and marketing are two different things

Your shop sends two completely different kinds of email, and we treat them differently on purpose.

Marketing is anything you send because you want somebody to buy: a campaign, a sale, a newsletter, a "you left something in your cart" reminder.

Receipts are the mail you owe somebody because of something they just did: an order confirmation, a shipping notice, a password reset, a login code, "we have your wholesale application".

What is different about a receipt

1. It goes even if they unsubscribed. Somebody who clicked "unsubscribe" on your newsletter still gets their order confirmation. Withholding it is not caution — it is a broken shop, and it is the number one reason people email support asking where their order went.
2. It needs no permission at all. Marketing has a permission test — by default, “did this address come from your own site?” — and a receipt has none, because they asked for it by ordering. The next section says exactly what the marketing test is.
3. It ignores your sending limit. If you have set "at most one marketing email per person per day", receipts do not count towards it and are never held back by it.
4. It carries no unsubscribe link and no postal address. Those are required on marketing email and would be strange on a receipt.
5. It does not count towards your plan's marketing sends.

What is the same

Three things still stop a receipt, and you cannot turn them off:

1. A dead mailbox. If an address hard-bounced, there is nobody there. We stop trying.
2. A spam complaint. If somebody marked your mail as spam, we stop.
3. A sending address you have not set up. Every email, receipt or not, has to come from a domain you have verified with us.

Who a marketing email goes to

By default, anyone who gave you their email on your own site. If somebody typed their address into your shop — an order, a checkout, a registration, one of your forms, a login code, an account — you can send them offers. That is the United States rule: you may email them until they ask you to stop, and every offer we send carries the unsubscribe link and your postal address that make stopping easy.

You can change it. Settings → Sending rules has one switch:

Three things are true whichever way you set it:

• An unsubscribe always wins. The moment somebody opts out they get no more offers, on either setting. So does a dead address, a spam complaint, and your own sending limit.
• Lists you imported are not covered. A file you uploaded, a list pulled in from another platform, or addresses pushed in through our API stay held back until there is real proof. This switch is about your own shop, not about somebody else's list.
• Text messages do not change. Marketing SMS still needs a ticked box that says it is marketing, for everybody, everywhere. There is no setting anywhere that loosens that and there never will be — the fines are per message.

Which one is which, in your flows

Every email step in a flow has a box that asks what kind of email is this. It has three answers:

Mark a step for what the email says, never for the flow it lives in. Worked through, on four emails from the same shop:

Putting a discount on the receipt setting sends that discount to people who unsubscribed, which is against the law in the United States and carries a penalty per email. When you are not sure, choose Marketing. It is never illegal to be too careful.

Sending a receipt from your own code

Anything sent through https://app.aminoengine.com/api/v1/send — or by our plugin's WordPress switch, or as a login code — is a receipt by construction. There is no setting, and you cannot accidentally send a campaign through that door:

KEY='PASTE-YOUR-SERVER-KEY-HERE'
BODY='{
  "to":"unsubscribed-buyer@yourstore.com",
  "subject":"Your order is confirmed",
  "html":"Order 1044. Thanks!"
}'
TS=$(date +%s)
SIG=$(printf '%s' "$TS.$BODY" \
  | openssl dgst -sha256 -hmac "$KEY" -hex | sed 's/^.* //')
curl -sS https://app.aminoengine.com/api/v1/send \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "X-AE-Timestamp: $TS" \
  -H "X-AE-Signature: sha256=$SIG" \
  --data "$BODY"

The key comes from Settings → General → API keys, and every request with it is signed — see "Connect a custom-built store with the API".

That arrives, even though the person is unsubscribed from your newsletter — which is exactly right. The rule is yours to keep on the other side: do not put an offer in it.

Keeping them on separate addresses

Under Reputation → Domains you can mark each of your sending domains for marketing, receipts, or both. New domains do both.

If you have two, split them. Then a bad campaign week can never slow down your order confirmations, because mailbox providers score each sending address separately.

If it didn't work

• A receipt did not arrive and the person is unsubscribed. Check the email step's "what kind of email is this" box. If it says Marketing, that is why.
• You marked a step as a receipt and it still did not go. Open the person's page. Every held-back email leaves a line saying which rule stopped it — most often a hard bounce or a spam complaint, neither of which can be overridden.
• A sale was held back and the reason says “no proof of consent”. Open the person's page. The line says which of three it was: your account is set to require a ticked box, or the address was imported rather than typed into your own site, or they opted out.
• Everything is held back. Check Reputation → Domains. A domain marked for receipts only will refuse a campaign, and one marked for marketing only will refuse a receipt. The refusal says which.

Still stuck? Email support@aminoengine.com and say which email you expected and who it was to. We can see exactly which rule stopped it.