No. 023
Adding a domain is now one screen — and where your DNS host supports it, Folio writes the records for you.
Connecting a custom domain used to be three surfaces held together by the person doing it: a wizard printed seven DNS records, a separate page checked them, and the values were carried between the two by hand. Everything after choosing the name now lives on a single setup screen. If your domain is on Cloudflare, you paste a scoped, single-use zone token and Folio writes every record through the API, reporting exactly what it created, merged, kept or skipped — an existing SPF record is merged rather than replaced, an enforced DMARC policy is left alone, and mail delivery is never cut over to Folio without you ticking a box that says so. If your domain is at GoDaddy, IONOS, Squarespace Domains, WordPress.com or another Domain Connect host, a button naming your own host hands the whole record set to them, signed so the host can verify the request really came from Folio. Alongside it: the plan you click on the pricing page now survives the entire signup, including email links, codes, passkeys and a cancelled checkout; the mobile inbox opens with a welcome rather than a blank mailbox and offers a retry instead of a false empty inbox when a request fails; there is a new free WorkMail migration checklist and a fit check to take before you switch; and the comparison pages had a factual audit that corrected a send limit important enough to change which provider some people should pick.
New
Connect a domain on one screen, with your DNS host doing the work where it can
Adding a domain meant reading seven DNS records off a wizard, leaving to enter them at your registrar, and returning to a different page to find out whether they had taken. Nothing told you when it worked, so anyone who closed the tab simply never learned. Everything after naming the domain now lives on one setup screen, and every route that used to send you elsewhere — the domain list, the verification nudge, the next-step card and the domain detail page — deep-links straight to it. The fast paths come first. On Cloudflare, you mint an Edit zone DNS token scoped to that one zone, paste it, and Folio writes every record through the API and reports what it created, merged, kept or skipped; the token is used for that one operation and never stored. Your existing SPF record is merged rather than overwritten, an enforced DMARC policy is kept as you set it, and an MX record pointing at another provider is never removed unless you explicitly tick the cutover box — which is only shown when another host is actually receiving your mail today. On a Domain Connect host such as GoDaddy, IONOS, Squarespace Domains or WordPress.com, a Connect with your host button appears once Folio has confirmed that host supports it, and hands over the record set for you to approve there. Those hand-off links are now cryptographically signed, so the receiving host can verify the request genuinely came from Folio and has not been altered in transit, and Folio's public verification key is published in DNS for them to check it against. Everything else — the record-by-record manual list, copy buttons, and live verification — is still there for hosts that support neither path.
Fixed
The plan you chose no longer disappears during signup
Clicking a plan on the pricing page did not actually carry that choice into signup: the tier and the monthly-or-yearly cadence were both discarded, and you arrived at billing with nothing selected and no indication that anything had been lost. The selection now travels the whole way through — through an emailed sign-in link opened in a different browser, through a verification code, through a passkey, and back again if you start checkout and cancel it — and ends at an explicit confirmation screen that states the plan and cadence before anything is charged. The pricing page also gained a short plan finder that recommends a tier from how much mail and how many domains you actually have, and the no-card preview is now clearly separated from the trial that does ask for a card, so it is obvious which one you are starting. Billing now waits for your account status to be genuinely current before it renders, offers a retry when a service call fails instead of showing a wrong state, and returns an expired session to sign-in without throwing away the plan you had picked.
Improved
The mobile inbox now opens with a welcome instead of a blank screen
Opening the app on a phone showed an empty mailbox while mail was still loading, which is indistinguishable from having no mail. Startup now shows a short “Getting your inbox ready…” message with quiet placeholder rows, and the notices that sit above the message list — billing warnings and domain setup guidance — are held back until mail has actually loaded, so an account whose billing status simply had not arrived yet is no longer told its billing is inactive. If a request fails or times out, you now get a retry instead of a mailbox that falsely reports being empty, and messages already on screen are kept rather than cleared when a refresh fails. Switching folders or searching quickly no longer lets a slower earlier response overwrite the newer one, and a slow identity lookup no longer holds up the messages themselves.
New
A free WorkMail migration checklist, and a fit check to run before you switch
Anyone weighing a move off Amazon WorkMail can now download a versioned migration checklist from the WorkMail migration hub with no account, no email address and no form, and share it by link. Next to it is a short capacity check that says plainly when Folio is the wrong tool — shared team queues, groupware calendaring and bulk sending are disqualified rather than sold to — so you can find that out in a minute instead of after a migration. The hub's own guidance was corrected too: the previous instructions could put a live domain through an avoidable delivery gap during cutover, and a section of the page could not be reached by keyboard.
Fixed
Comparison pages understated Migadu's daily sending limits
Our Forward Email versus Migadu comparison stated that Migadu had no published cap on outbound mail. It does: on the $19-a-year Micro tier the limit is 20 outgoing messages a day, counted across every domain and mailbox on the account. That single figure changes the recommendation, because the tier that actually matches Forward Email's 300-a-day allowance is Migadu's $290-a-year Standard plan, not the $19 one — so the comparison people were making was between the wrong two numbers. Re-checking both vendors' own pages on 7 September also found that Migadu's Standard tier was missing from our pricing table entirely, and that its administrative API was listed as unavailable when it exists. Three further Migadu comparisons said nothing about send limits at all, leaving the cheapest tier reading as unmetered; each now carries the per-tier caps in its feature table, pricing table, verdict and FAQ. Counterpart limits for Fastmail, Zoho Mail, Purelymail and Google Workspace were verified against each vendor's own documentation on the same day.
New
A new Purelymail versus Forward Email comparison
A new page at Purelymail vs Forward Email compares the two on the point most comparisons skip: what each one's terms of service actually permit. Purelymail's terms prohibit using the service to send mailing-list or advertising email and allow immediate suspension, with payments non-refundable; Forward Email's explicitly permit transactional and opt-in marketing mail subject to unsubscribe headers and a one-time domain review. For anyone who wants a cheap mailbox and also sends a monthly update to their own list, that is the deciding difference rather than the price gap. The page also works out the storage crossover point from each vendor's published add-on rates, and was written from a fresh reading of both vendors' pricing, features, FAQ and terms pages rather than copied from a sibling page.
Improved
Buyer guides rewritten against provider documentation, with the wrong claims removed
Five guides covering custom-domain email without Google Workspace, multi-domain webmail, the cheapest way to host several email domains, and email hosting for multiple websites were rewritten with sourced direct answers, comparison tables, setup steps and visible FAQs. The rewrite existed mainly to remove things that were not true: Google Workspace licensing was described in a way that implied a charge per domain rather than per user, several competitors' capabilities were overstated, and the pages carried blanket claims about being cheapest and about deliverability and privacy that nothing supported. Each replacement cites the provider documentation it reads from, discloses that Folio wrote it, and says where Folio is the wrong fit. Separately, twelve pages that were all competing for the same Google Workspace question have been consolidated onto the five that people actually reach, and two comparison pages that existed but were linked from nowhere are now reachable from the comparison index.
Reliability
Marketing links keep their tags through the CDN, and the redirect map has room to grow again
Public pages are served through a CDN rule that tidies up URLs, and it was stripping every query string — which quietly removed the campaign tags on any link shared from a newsletter or a social post before anything could record where the visit came from. The five standard campaign parameters are now preserved through those redirects while everything else is still tidied away, the canonical URL published to search engines stays clean, and there is a check after every deploy that a tagged production URL still arrives with its tags. The same CDN function holds the site's redirect map and must fit inside a hard 10,240-byte limit that is only enforced when a deploy runs, and it had been left with 152 bytes of headroom — less than one more redirect. Moving its explanatory comments out of the shipped block and into the surrounding template, which is not counted, restored 2,294 bytes without deleting a single line of the explanation or changing any behaviour.
Everything above is live in the product today. Start free — no card, or read the manual.