Launch HN: AgentMail (YC S25) – An API that gives agents their own email inboxes

The only problem I have experienced few times with those unique email addresses is, sometimes they/utilities ask me to email from my official email address, and my setup is a catch-all, so I have to log in my pc at home, set up that address, send email.

That looks really interesting! Thanks for writing and sharing it!

Fancy == tickled

Fair concern, and I agree on the end state. Agents will eventually use native agent-to-agent protocols.

The question is the transition, because email is undoubtedly the most ubiquitous channel of communication in today. I would only give my agent an A2A integration if your agent has an A2A integration, but because you don't we are at a stalemate. I'd rather just give my agent an inbox where I know it can communicate with the other billions of people that already have an email address.

Email isn’t the final protocol for agents. It’s the bridge that lets them participate in today’s internet while native agent protocols/networks emerge.

And you probably don't want to dump the emails first thing into the agent's context. You should insert a cup of coffee and the morning newspaper into the context, and only then the emails.

We do have robust checks in place to catch spam and bad actors(reputation, SPF DKIM DMARC, etc.) but as with all tools there will be bad actors who come up with creative ways to scheme for nefarious purposes.

We expect our infra and policies to evolve with usage, and one of our goals is to make agent driven email safer than the status quo, not just more scalable

I don't think they use the agentmail domain for sending emails. Users connect their own domain and manage reputation (similar to all the other email marketing tools)

Network effects - agents need to meet humans where they already work. Would rather use something standard than bespoke.

Yup think there is plenty of ways the product can evolve evolve

Because we built the same inbox infrastructure as Gmail. Inboxes have threads, threads have messages, messages have attachments. You can search, label, filter, reply, forward. None of this comes out of the box with SES.

We are using AgentMail for sourcing quotes here at scale with various top shippers. It’s not about letting the agent act in fully deterministic ways, it’s about setting up the right guardrails. The agents can now do most of the job, but when there’s low confidence on their output, we have human in the loop systems to act fast. At least in competitive industries like logistics, if you don’t leverage these types of workflows, you’re getting very behind, which ultimately costs you more money than being off by some dollars or cents when giving a quote back.

This refers to B2B use cases that are live in production. Finding, contacting, and negotiating with vendors is a tedious process in many industries. In the time a human reaches out to 10 vendors, an agent reaches out to 100 or 1000. So it finds deals that a human would not have.

The moat around TV shows feels gone with TikTok/YT.

I am 99% certain I could reach parity in a weekend by publishing content on public networks, without the old distribution or pricing constraints.

I think it would all run on infrastructure that is effectively free to use.

I am not certain I have the bandwidth to handle distribution, sustained attention, and moderation once the content starts flowing.

We're going to collapse society with this style of thinking, particularly since it can now escape out into the realm of non-technical folks.

Death of true understanding because everyone feels entitled to paying the lowest perceived monetary cost possible for everything in their lives.

This depends on what kind of SaaS

I guarantee you that the "moat" is very much intact for the SaaS we are building (more developer / gaming tool but then again so is this) because it requires specialized skills, synthesis and most importantly AI would have no idea how to build it without very specific prompting from our architect

CRUD wrappers never had a moat. Even the most basic viable SaaS that wasnt a micro SaaS had some secret sauce or differentiation. And AI doesnt help you get that unless you already know what it is.

Not to mention network effects. Users are a moat and if you can sell and grow fast enough and create a community, no amount of "there's a clone" can beat it. Never underestimate the power of brand recognition.

the moat is always going to exist between the haves and have nots. AI just raises the bar for the standard of quality. you are not going to vibe code a new OS in a weekend - or else everyone else and their mamas could, too, in which case, you wouldn't be special

This is not true. And it's easy to disprove.

Most SaaS pre-AI had an open source alternative. Most people didn't use them not because the open source alternative lack some features, it was because mainteinance was hard. It's way easier to pay a small monthly fee and forget about it.

Perhaps you could, but you probably always could've built a clone of any SaaS app you wanted, it's just become faster.

I'm reminded of the infamous Dropbox Hacker News comment[1]. If you're looking at stuff like this thinking "what's the point? I could just make that myself" then you're not the target audience in the same sort of way Ikea isn't trying to sell stuff to carpenters.

This is true even when the barrier to entry in making these sorts of systems has gotten way lower.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Isn’t your comment just the “modern” take on the famous HN comment deriding Dropbox?

> The moat for SaaS is gone.

What does this even mean?

I could spend $1,000s on tokens asking an agent to build (some semblance of) Sentry, or New Relic, but why would I bother? I have real work to do in the near-term, and I'm happy to pay for services that help me do it.

Exactly this ... tools like Claude Code have flattened the complexity curve of building/maintaining things like this to practically zero.

I thought cloudflares email product is only for receiving, not outbound ?

honestly, I have been thinking about it. But I feel like it would be a fun little side project if people actually try it out. (maybe you mention that you can build it)

So let's see how many people actually build it. Let's make it the new browser test instead and launch many open source solutions instead and see what's the best perhaps.

It would be a really great experiment imo.

Cloned in less than 24 hours. [0]

[0] https://github.com/ted2048-maker/aimailbox

thank you, this means a lot!

likewise

we have a few things in place, allowlists and permissions act as a layer. also beginning some work on prompt isolation within api soon. but having an isolated identity + data within a separate agentic inbox also puts less risk of your personal email data being injected - which is most people's main concern

Thats why we built it :) We have an integration with n8n, will build one for Glean

i'd love to know more about these use cases. open to chatting sometime? adi@agentmail.cc is my email

Yes lots of use cases!

Yes we are adding for email/domain allow/blocklists. Same for fine-grained permissions.

We have had some users get banned from Gmail for using it Clawdbot. Regardless our API is way more agent friendly and I think your Clawdbot would agree.

Thanks, yes we are continuously learning

Happy we could provide a solution!

We know the founder of this pretty well actually. It's not really an alternative. They are an MCP that is building an email-like layer for coding agents to talk to each other. We are an actual email inbox provisioned via API for agents to email agents or humans.

We build "long running" email agents. But it's not really long running in the sense of an agent taking 1000's of actions in a giant loop.

It's more "long running" because the agent takes 4 steps, then waits a week for the user to email it back. We might have a successful client exchange that takes a month, but for the Agent it's 99% just waiting for the next user reply.

Hmm why do you say that? Would love to hear your thoughts

Why didn't you just use something like Mailinator? They specialize in this exact thing. Gives you an API to grab links and everything. That's what I use.

Yup plus webhooks are overkill for this. Need to set up a public HTTP server and pass messages to your agents. With websockets you can open connection right from your agent and close it in seconds once the 2FA code is delivered.

... you had to use Zapier to extract an email from an inbox?

Nope AgentMail is its own infra. Not a single line of Gmail/Outlook code in the codebase

That is a compelling use case

ty :)

thanks for the input, we always appreciate constructive feedback!

This is a good point. We have anti-spam measures in place and allow users to configure allow/blocklists to mitigate attacks.

Can't wait for agents to change the code they are building to buy Amazon Point cards at Target and send the codes back.

Email is already the internet’s identity layer. By giving agents their own inbox they don't need to borrow human identity rather act as first class actors on their own.

It lets agents plug into the same trust systems the web already uses! And this opens the door to new ways agents can do work and build credibility on the internet.

The nice thing about email is that identity verification is already built in. In fact online identity is based on email.

> Because we built the same inbox infrastructure as Gmail. Inboxes have threads, threads have messages, messages have attachments. You can search, label, filter, reply, forward. None of this comes out of the box with SES.

aws just gives you a low-level smtp + api service. we are the application layer they do not offer but your agents need to actually use email as first-class users.

This alone doesn't give you gmail UX - threads, inboxes, tagging, etc.

No offence, but this reads to me like the classic dropbox HN comment

The idea is pretty solid, automation platforms often provision a mailbox per flow for this reason, so it makes sense to make a generic service that can be used through MCP for agents

how's traction going? Do you worry about some open-source project replacing it?

I think agentic email communication can be productive as well!

yup, hard to do that too. AgentMail actually gives agents email addresses and treats them as first class inbox owners with the capability of sending and receiving emails with any other email address.

the mcp agent mail project is agents getting their own identity in an internal messaging layer.

Done. Texts can be sent to email addresses and texts can be sent via email, and you can dictate texts and have them read back to you with text-to-voice.

We have gotten a lot of requests for SMS. Seems like a natural next step.

Nice seems like we are building towards a similar vision. Would love to collaborate!

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I've used email as MQ since forever also, and can highly recommend this pattern.

Exactly why we built it

Taking a look will make a fix asap

Love getting downvoted for mentioning that the website doesn't properly load and reeks of vibe coding :D

If that's the quality y'all can live with and accept, no wonder the web turned to shit.

I can smell it from here tbh

The website is really bad. If one moves from Python to curl in the website, one really sees how much noticable lag there is.

Like holy Cow, I am not sure what to say seeing such noticable lag

The time to go from python to curl. I have seen websites load faster, heck I feel like even 2-3 whole websites can actually be loaded in the noticable lag time we observe.

Absolutely crazy to witness.

Don't know about all but certainly a significant proportion!