Email tracking shows you whether each download email was delivered, opened, or bounced — per order, in Fileflare’s admin. Useful when a customer claims they didn’t receive their files (you can check whether the email was opened) and for spotting deliverability issues before they become support tickets.
Available on the Growth plan and higher. Tracking only works when you’re using Fileflare’s default sending domain (noreply@digital-downloads.com). If you’ve connected your own SMTP provider, tracking moves to your provider’s dashboard.
When you’d use this
- A customer says they didn’t get the email — you can verify it was sent and whether they opened it.
- You’re chasing down chargebacks where customers claim non-delivery; tracked opens are evidence.
- You’re investigating bounce rates or spam-folder placement before launching a campaign.
Where to find it
- Open Fileflare from your Shopify Apps menu.
- Go to Orders and click an order number.
- Scroll to the Timeline card.
Email events sit in the same chronological feed as the order’s file downloads, so you can read the delivery story and the customer’s behavior together — email sent, email opened, file downloaded. See Order activity timeline for the full tour.
The filter icon in the card’s top-right is how you narrow the feed. In the screenshot above it’s open on All activity, which is the default and shows downloads and emails together — choose Emails instead to hide the download rows while you read delivery history.
For a quick read without scrolling, the figures strip at the top of the order carries an Emails sent tile showing the status of the most recent one. That tile is there on every plan — it’s the per-event detail below it that needs email tracking.
What you can see
Each email event is its own row in the timeline, written as a sentence:
- Email sent to… — Fileflare dispatched the email.
- Email delivered to… — the recipient’s mail server accepted it.
- Email opened by… and Email link clicked — the customer engaged with it.
- Email bounced when sending to… — rejected by the recipient’s mail server (full mailbox, invalid address, blocked sender). Expand the row to see the reason your provider gave.
- Email delayed and Email dropped — held for a later retry, or discarded before delivery.
All three Fileflare emails appear here: the standard download email, the file-update notification, and the pre-order release email.
Tracking takes about 5 minutes to update — the email system has to roundtrip the open/bounce signal back to Fileflare.
Common issues
- No email rows in the timeline — confirm the email was actually sent. If there’s no send event, the order may not have been Paid yet, or Fileflare emails are disabled in Settings » Download delivery » Emails.
- The timeline shows downloads but never emails — email events are plan-gated to Growth and above. Download events show on every plan.
- No “Email opened” row ever appears — some email clients (Apple Mail with privacy protection, some corporate clients) block open tracking by design. Absent open data isn’t proof the email wasn’t received.
- I’m using SMTP and tracking is empty — by design. Fileflare’s tracking layer only runs on the default sender. Use your SMTP provider’s dashboard (Postmark, SendGrid, etc.) for tracking on outbound emails.
- Bounce shown but customer says they got it — possible the email retried successfully after the first bounce. Read all the rows for the order, not just the first one.
- An older email isn’t in the timeline — the feed shows the 25 most recent entries, so a busy order can push old emails off the end.