No. 017
A domain another project already claimed can now finish setup on its own.
The week's headline is a rule that replaces a queue: prove you control a domain's DNS and Folio will use a sending identity it didn't create. Alongside it, a setup page that stops calling things green when they aren't, prices that lead with the monthly rate, and unknown links that finally return a real 404.
New
Prove the zone is yours and sending unlocks itself
Some domains already have a sending identity registered elsewhere — set up by another project, or by an earlier tool, long before Folio saw them. Folio refuses to take over an identity it didn't create, which is right, but it left those domains permanently short of the records they needed and there was nothing the owner could do about it. Now there is: publish the four records already on your setup page and Folio checks them itself, including a DKIM key it generated at a selector only the zone's controller could answer for. When they resolve, the remaining records are issued automatically on the next pass. No ticket, no waiting on us, and no change to how the identity behaves for whoever else is using it — Folio will use it to send, and still never rename, retag, or delete it.
Fixed
Setup no longer reports green when it isn't
Three checks on the setup page could pass on records a receiving mail server would reject. SPF and DMARC were matched anywhere in the record rather than at its start, so a value that had accidentally kept its quote marks counted as valid; and a domain carrying two SPF or two DMARC records passed, when in fact a duplicate means no policy is applied at all. Because these checks are what unlock sending, a false green could authorise mail from a domain with no working authentication. All three now match the way a receiver does. Separately, a domain that can't finish outbound setup now shows all seven record positions with the reason, instead of announcing seven, rendering four, and quietly reloading itself every ten seconds forever.
Fixed
Pricing leads with the monthly rate
The pricing and home pages headlined the full annual total, so $348/yr sat next to competitors quoting $7 per user per month — which reads as expensive even though Folio is dramatically cheaper for anyone running several businesses. Both cadences now headline the monthly rate, with the billed total directly beneath at full ink, and the trial line moved up next to the price where the question about committing to a year actually lands. The comparison figures were re-checked against primary sources at the same time: Microsoft 365 Business Basic is $7, not $6, and Fastmail Business is $3, not $4 — we had been overstating a competitor's price in our own favour. The annual saving is 25%, which we had been understating as 20%.
Fixed
Unknown links return a real 404, and old links land where they meant to
Any address that didn't exist on folioinbox.com returned the home page with a success code, which told search engines and AI crawlers that every mistyped or stale URL was a real page. Misses now return a genuine 404 with a page that offers somewhere useful to go, while the app's own deep links keep working as before. Seventeen addresses that were linked from elsewhere but never shipped — a features and solutions structure this site never had, plus near-misses of real URLs — now redirect to the page that answers the same question, in a single hop.
Reliability
Domain setup stopped queueing behind a shared AWS limit
Folio's AWS account is shared with other projects, and two background jobs were asking Amazon about every sending identity in it one at a time, against a limit of roughly one request per second. Once the account passed a couple of dozen identities that reliably hit the ceiling — and a request that gets refused looks the same as a negative answer, so a bad pass could quietly stop tidying up bounce records or under-report problems on the admin view. Both now ask a single question against a different, far more generous service. Retries on the shared connection were also capped, so a throttling incident can't turn an interactive click during domain setup into a minute-long wait.
Reliability
Infrastructure changes are checked before they deploy
A permissions stack had been stuck in a failed state since late June, silently rejecting every update, and the daily check meant to catch that couldn't run its deeper assertions. The stack is unblocked, the check now runs in full on a schedule, and a class of change that quietly forces AWS to delete and recreate a live permissions policy has been identified and backed out. None of this is visible in the product; it is the difference between a deployment that is verified and one that is assumed.
Improved
Search copy, and a changelog that was showing its own scaffolding
Two rounds of search and answer-engine work across the marketing pages: clearer titles and descriptions on pages that were being seen but not clicked, better internal links into the pages nothing reached, and repairs to seventeen dead links inside published writing. Found while checking that work: this page and the shipping log on the home page had been serving the release-notes drafter's raw output — placeholder headings and unfinished sentences — for several weeks. Those releases are now written, and a test now refuses to let an unwritten draft reach the site again.
Everything above is live in the product today. Start free — no card, or read the manual.