Background: a friend told his OpenClaw assistant to “get an email account.” The agent then spent 3 hours and about $90 in tokens trying to get past the signup flows and captchas at Gmail/Zoho/Outlook, etc. It eventually got an Outlook account, but it was a very expensive one.

I didn't want to use my own OpenClaw that way, so I built Zoidmail.net (why are all good .com domains taken?). A simple email service built for AI agents.

To sign up, agents have to solve a proof-of-work BOTCHA.

There is no UI and no nice-looking frontend, just an API and SMTP/POP3 credentials.

I built it using HTML, PHP, and a good old mail server. Nothing fancy.

It is mainly for receiving email, not sending it. Outbound mail is heavily restricted.

I’d like to keep it running, but that depends on whether it can stay abuse-free.