Dept. of migrations · Google Workspace → Folio

Move in ten minutes.
Without dropping a letter.

Moving a custom domain off Google Workspace into Folio takes about ten minutes of registrar work. Lower your existing MX TTL, publish Folio's MX/SPF/DMARC alongside Workspace's, swap MX over so Folio is the sole receiver, then cancel Workspace after roughly a week of overlap. No mailbox migration — only DNS — so nothing in your archive moves.

A printed-out plan for migrating one domain off Google Workspace into Folio. Mail keeps flowing through Workspace until you flip the MX in Stage II — and Workspace stays receiving for about a week after that as a quiet safety net.

Type your domain below. The DNS records re-render to your domain in place. Copy them into your registrar in the order on this page. Total hands-on work is roughly ten minutes; the rest is waiting on DNS to propagate.

Updated 11 May 2026 (2026-05-11)

Proof of move · enter once, used throughout
Registrar

Preflight · before we start

Lower the TTL.
Keep your nerve.

The actual cutover takes seconds — you delete one MX row and add another. The slow part is DNS propagation: the world's resolvers cache your old MX for as long as the TTL says they may. If your current MX TTL is set to a day, a misclicked cutover will haunt you for a day.

Lower the TTL on your existing Workspace MX records to 300 seconds at least an hour before you plan to cut over. That's your rollback insurance: if anything misbehaves after Stage II, reverting takes five minutes instead of twenty-four hours.

  1. i Open your registrar (Cloudflare). Find the MX records for your-domain.com.
  2. ii Lower the TTL on every existing Workspace MX row to 300. Save.
  3. iii Wait an hour. Have a coffee. Continue to Stage I.

Stage I · no downtime · safe at any time

Add Folio's three records.

Publish these alongside your existing Workspace records. Mail keeps flowing through Workspace; nothing changes for senders or recipients. You're laying down the new track next to the old one.

  1. № 01MX
    Host
    your-domain.com
    Value
    10 inbound.wm.emcognito.com

    The world's mail servers learn that mail for this domain belongs at Folio's inbound MTA. Priority 10 — there's no backup, the MTA is the single authoritative receiver.

  2. № 02TXT
    Host
    your-domain.com
    Value
    v=spf1 include:emcognito.com ~all

    SPF — authorize Folio's outbound IPs to send mail on this domain's behalf. The soft-fail (~all) is intentional; DMARC below is what enforces.

  3. № 03TXT
    Host
    _dmarc.your-domain.com
    Value
    v=DMARC1; p=reject; sp=reject; adkim=s; aspf=r; rua=mailto:dmarc@emcognito.com

    DMARC with strict DKIM alignment — reject anything not properly signed. Aggregate reports go to dmarc@emcognito.com; Folio owns the external reporting authorization, so do not add a separate _report._dmarc record.

On Cloudflare

Open DNS · Records on the domain. Add each row as a new record. The MX entry is plain DNS, not a worker — keep the orange-cloud proxy OFF (gray cloud); Cloudflare cannot proxy mail.

Two more records — one for per-domain DKIM, one for SES verification — are domain-specific and get generated when you sign up. The in-app domain wizard hands you those values to paste in the same place. They'd be guesswork if we tried to print them here.

Stage II · the cutover · about five minutes

Replace Workspace's MX.

You added Folio's MX in Stage I. It sits there inert until Workspace's MX rows are gone — whichever resolves first wins, and Workspace's lower-priority entries currently win every time. Now you remove Workspace's rows and the new MX takes over the moment caches refresh.

Delete these from the MX records on your-domain.com
  1. 1 SMTP.GOOGLE.COM
  2. 1 ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM
  3. 5 ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM
  4. 5 ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM
  5. 10 ALT3.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM
  6. 10 ALT4.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM

Whichever you have, delete them. Some Workspace tenants run the legacy 5-record set; others the newer single SMTP.GOOGLE.COM entry. Match what's actually in your DNS panel — don't add rows just to delete them.

The MX you added in Stage I is now the only one on your-domain.com. Resolvers refresh within the TTL window you set in Stage 0 — five minutes to half an hour. New mail begins arriving in Folio immediately.

Stage III · cleanup · do this in a week

Wait a week.
Then cancel.

Workspace continues to receive mail for a few days after the MX flip — every cached resolver eventually refreshes, but stragglers may still hit Workspace for up to a week. Don't cancel until that tail is gone. Look at the Workspace inbox occasionally; once it's been three days since the last delivery, you're clear.

Workspace was a bundle. Folio replaces only the email half. Plan for the other three before the subscription stops.

Calendar. Meeting invites and a simple agenda can move with Folio; shared team calendars may still belong in iCloud, Fastmail, Proton Calendar, or a single Workspace seat.

Drive. Google Takeout exports the whole library — into local storage, Dropbox, or another cloud provider.

Meet. Replace with Zoom, Whereby, or whichever video tool the team already keeps open.

Before you cancel — pull anything irreplaceable. New mail begins arriving in Folio the moment you flip the MX in Stage II. Mail received before that date stays inside Workspace; once the subscription lapses, Google removes the mailbox. Use Google Takeout at takeout.google.com to export the full Gmail archive — a thirty- to sixty-minute job for several years of mail. Drive, Calendar, and Photos leave through the same door.

  1. Watch the Workspace inbox for ~7 days. Forward anything important to your new Folio address.
  2. Cancel the Workspace subscription in Admin · Billing · Subscriptions.
  3. If other tools (transactional senders, marketing platforms) were authorised via Workspace's SPF, update their SPF entries. Folio's SPF on your-domain.com already covers Folio's own outbound; everything else needs its own includes.

Open the first letter

Bind your-domain.com
to Folio.

The plan above gets you onto Folio's MX. The signup adds your DKIM key and proves the domain to SES so outbound starts signing properly — that part takes about as long as the registrar changes did, probably less, because the wizard pre-fills everything based on the records you've already published.

Set up your domain →See what it costs

No card needed. The first domain you bind and the first 100 sends are free; the 14-day card trial begins only when you want to bring more domains under one roof.

Common questions

Questions migrators ask.

Will any mail bounce during the cutover?

No, if you follow the overlap plan. Both Workspace's MX and Folio's MX accept inbound for the domain during the transition window; senders that resolve either receiver will deliver. Once the MX swap propagates fully, mail flows only to Folio.

Do I need to move my existing Workspace mailbox archive?

No. The migration covers DNS only — Folio starts receiving new mail at cutover. Your historical Gmail archive stays in Workspace (export it via Google Vault or Takeout if you want a local copy) and is not affected by the DNS change.

How long until I can cancel Workspace?

Plan for about seven days of overlap. After a week with no mail arriving at Workspace's MX (you'll see this in Admin Console traffic stats), it's safe to downgrade or cancel the subscription.

What about other domains aliased onto my Workspace tenant?

Each aliased domain needs its own MX change and its own Folio binding. The plan on this page is per-domain; repeat the four-record DNS swap for each one before cancelling Workspace.

Does this work if I use a third-party MX-routing layer like Mailgun or Cloudflare Email Routing?

Yes. The MX records you publish point at Folio's inbound server; any routing layer that previously pointed at Google's ASPMX records gets re-pointed at Folio or removed. See the registrar-specific notes below.

Sources & further reading