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

36•Haakam21•1h ago
Hey HN, we're Haakam, Michael, and Adi. We're building AgentMail (https://agentmail.to), the email inbox API for agents. We’re not talking about AI for your email, this is email for your AI.

Email is an optimal interface for long-running agents. It’s multithreaded and asynchronous with full support for rich text and files. It’s a universal protocol with identity and authentication built in. Moreover, a lot of workflow critical context already lives in email.

We wanted to build email agents that you can forward your work to and get back a completed task. The agents could act entirely autonomously as you wouldn't need to delegate your identity. If they did get stuck they could just send you, or anyone else, an email.

Using Gmail, we kept getting stuck on the limitations of their API. No way to create inboxes programmatically. Rate and sending limits. OAuth for every single inbox. Keyword search that doesn't understand context. Per-seat pricing that doesn't work for agents.

So we built what we wished existed: an email provider for developers. APIs for creating inboxes and configuring domains. Email parsing and threading. Text extraction from attachments. Realtime webhooks and websockets. Semantic search across inboxes. Usage-based pricing that works for agents.

Developers, startups, and enterprises are already deploying email agents with AgentMail. Agents that convert conversations and documents into structured data. Agents that source quotes, negotiate prices, and get the best deals. Agents that emulate internet users for training models on end-to-end tasks.

Here's demo of Clawdbots communicating using AgentMail: https://youtu.be/Y0MfUWS3LKQ

You can get started with AgentMail for free at https://agentmail.to

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback.

Comments

throw03172019•1h ago
The 2FA via email case is great. I recently had to build a browser automation workflow that required 2FA. I ended up using Zapier to monitor email inbox and then extract the code and send back to our API. It was a bit slow.
Haakam21•1h ago
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.
ckenst•8m ago
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.
rootnod3•1h ago
"Application error: a client-side exception has occurred while loading www.agentmail.to (see the browser console for more information)."

> Looks at developer console...

- "Failed to create WebGL context: WebGL is currently disabled." Dafuq does an email website need WebGL for?

- "Cookie “dmn_chk_xxxxxxxx-yyyy-dead-beef-123456789ABC” has been rejected for invalid domain."

Let me guess...vibe-coded?

acedTrex•1h ago
I can smell it from here tbh
rootnod3•1h ago
Called it! https://www.ismscopilot.com/isms-copilot-cookie-policy
Haakam21•1h ago
Taking a look will make a fix asap
rootnod3•53m ago
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.

kasane_teto•5m ago
trvth
chasd00•1h ago
hah this is a great idea! sending email is such a common way to communicate and having agents with an inbox makes so much obvious sense. heh just don't let their addresses get out who knows how they'll respond to spam and phishing attempts.
rootnod3•1h ago
Can't wait for agents to change the code they are building to buy Amazon Point cards at Target and send the codes back.
Haakam21•53m ago
This is a good point. We have anti-spam measures in place and allow users to configure allow/blocklists to mitigate attacks.
keepamovin•1h ago
Hey I’m also working on this what a coincidence: https://ai-chat.email

Second time at least HN is launching YC on one of my products:

BrowserBox - hyperbeam

Mailpilot/AI-chat.email - agentnail

Haakam21•51m ago
Nice seems like we are building towards a similar vision. Would love to collaborate!
keepamovin•7m ago
Sure, bud. Cut me in on your 500K!

My Show from 14 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46629191 - hmm, why didn't it get into YC?

waynenilsen•1h ago
amazing now do the same for voice and sms!
Haakam21•56m ago
We have gotten a lot of requests for SMS. Seems like a natural next step.
waynenilsen•52m ago
i think when someone makes the cli like this they're going to win

$ phone call bill

ok call_id=3f2a

$ phone status 3f2a

dialing

$ phone status 3f2a

answered

bill: hello

$ phone say 3f2a "hey, quick question"

ok

singpolyma3•24m ago
Good luck getting this past A2P campaign registration rules...
stronglikedan•53m ago
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.
HarryDu•1h ago
In the future all the agent communication will be using agentmail!
Haakam21•46m ago
Don't know about all but certainly a significant proportion!
rippeltippel•50m ago
Finally agents can spam other agents, instead of humans.
Haakam21•47m ago
I think agentic email communication can be productive as well!
smpandya•41m ago
Cool launch. Assuming you guys view email (and therefore SMTP) as becoming the de facto agent communication protocol in the long run. My question — why not something bespoke, similar to OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol or x402 from Coinbase?
Haakam21•34m ago
Network effects - agents need to meet humans where they already work. Would rather use something standard than bespoke.
kushbhuwalka•40m ago
lets goooo
pbronez•38m ago
Very interesting. I have a lot of enterprise AI use cases that would really benefit from being email native.

We’re an O365 GCC shop. Appreciate that your enterprise options include Bring Your Own Cloud, that makes things much easier for us.

It would be nice to have integrations with n8n and Glean.

Haakam21•32m ago
Thats why we built it :) We have an integration with n8n, will build one for Glean
thedrake•10m ago
and a request for gumloop. (a YC alum) https://docs.gumloop.com/
alongub•34m ago
AgentMail looks amazing!
wild_egg•22m ago
I guess not to be confused with https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/mcp_agent_mail?
biddit•22m ago
> Agents that source quotes, negotiate prices, and get the best deals.

Didn't Alexa fail miserably with the "have AI buy something for me" theory?

There is a significant mental in allowing someone else make purchase decisions on my behalf:

- With a human, there is accountability.

- With deterministic software, there is reproducibility.

With an agent, you get neither.

FWIW - I am not anti-LLM. I work with them and build them full time.

gustrigos•14m ago
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.
Haakam21•13m ago
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.
nerdsniper•22m ago
How does this differentiate from a solution like AWS SES? (Which I assume AI Agents would be quite adept at using to send email)

I understand the differentiator vs GMail, but API-based scripted email access isn’t new.

Haakam21•17m ago
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.
ritomsen09•20m ago
How do you think this will help with identity verification in the future?
Haakam21•6m ago
The nice thing about email is that identity verification is already built in. In fact online identity is based on email.
mhykim•5m ago
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.

dbushell•17m ago
Dead internet theory.
wild_egg•10m ago
> Email is an optimal interface for long-running agents.

Long-running agents are themselves not optimal though. There are a ton of these coordination layers for long running agents now but they don't make any sense under other paradigms

Haakam21•7m ago
Hmm why do you say that? Would love to hear your thoughts

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