alt Hacker NewsShow HN: AgentMail – Email infra for AI agents
Hey HN, we're Haakam, Michael, and Adi. We're building AgentMail (https://agentmail.to/), an API to give AI agents their own email inboxes. We’re not talking about AI for your email, this is email for your AI.
We started building email agents because they can converse with users in their inboxes, automate email-based workflows, and authenticate with third-party applications. Given these unique capabilities, we think email will be a core interface for agents.
But we were building on top of Gmail, which was a struggle: poor API support, expensive subscriptions, rate limits, sending limits, GCP Pub/Sub, OAuth, crappy keyword search, and an overall terrible developer experience.
Gmail and other providers didn’t work for us. So we decided to bite the bullet and build our own.
AgentMail is like Gmail, but API-first, with programmatic inbox creation, events over webhooks and websockets, simple API key auth, organization-wide semantic search, structured data extraction, and usage-based pricing that scales with emails sent/received.
Here’s a demo of building an email agent: https://youtu.be/1V7BISeFUTM, and here’s a demo of a voice agent with its own email inbox: https://youtu.be/eG2fCsRK4RY
So far AgentMail has been deployed to use cases such as apps with dedicated inboxes for each user, voice agents that receive documents in real time, automated account provisioning and QA testing, cold outbound platforms with thousands of inboxes, automations for processing invoices, and agents that coordinate work with humans and other agents.
We would love to hear your thoughts and feedback. You can try our playground at https://chat.agentmail.to
Comments
Keep in mind that default Gmail allows webhooks for any changes (email received but also changing labels, etc), for free using Gmail pubsub. I use it a lot because it's the only way of getting programmatic notifications from credit card purchases (turn on purchase alerts to all cards, send to Gmail, have a filter archive but capture the reception in webhooks. Parse with simple regex)
Super fast low latency very satisfying. Pubsub scales well and free :)
Curious: how are you tackling abuse/spam at scale, especially as more agents start talking to each other? Also, any plans for plug-and-play integrations with popular agent frameworks, or is the focus purely on infra for now?
Congrats on shipping - looking forward to seeing your journey.
I was previously considering building in this space but the infra around sending /receiving email for lots of addresses seemed like a major pain before getting to anything properly exciting, excited to see this! Would also encourage you to build good local dev/testing infra, dealing with email gets messy.
I believe truly useful AI assistants will use the same tools that humans prefer to use, rather than forcing us to come to it (in the same way truly intelligent embodied AI would use the same spaces/stairs/tools/doors as humans). Email, despite all its warts, still runs a lot of the world.
This is perfect timing for me - was just thinking about how to do this. But pricing is a bit steep for a startup currently looking to prove the market. Would you consider a cheaper option (e.g. 1 free inbox, or maybe $20/mo for 5 agent inboxes and a more limited storage level)? I'm building something that I might consider this for, but I don't know how long my runway is before I get sustainable client revenue, so $100/month is a deep hole being burned in my personal pocket before I can prove my MVP out.
I do not have a use case for this _right now_. But I am a 100% sure I will have one pretty soon.
Email has become this massive, constant influx of information, that cannot be managed with just adding an AI agent to it. It takes so much more context knowledge to get right. None of the tools I have tried so far seem to solve this problem the way I would need it.
So sooner or later I might solve it for myself. And you guys will get a new customer.
Good luck, cowboys!
i created this last summer
(test just email [email protected])
sadly it never took off so it just became another abandoned side project
but still sometimes I use it ie do distill long emails or translate them without leaving the inbox - also the reminder and todo list feature is nice - whereby i mostly use the "remind me of this email next monday"
so my learnings for email agents: give them a sense of time and memory. its not only about that you write an email and send it but also when to write whom
Why build with email now? Isn’t the world moving towards voice / live-chat paradigms?
Is the '10.000.000+ emails processed' all from alpha/beta testers?
What is the infrastructure tooling behind this product? I wanted to build this but it seemed like it is not a small startup project to build such big infra without riding on the existing email infra (which results in loss of the excitement to actually build the project itself and continue using the existing email infra by giants)
With this type of products, I feel like spamming nuisance will dramatically increase if mitigation doesn’t catch up
You mentioned one of your use case is outbound (can totally see this being perhaps your biggest opportunity): How are people using this for outbound? As a full-cycle AI sales agent?
I'm interested in trying agentmail for one of our internal agents, but I noticed you're still on a waitlist and the "contact us" and "contact sales" buttons don’t seem to be clickable.
Just wanted to flag in case it's a bug. Excited to try it once access opens up.
Onboarding/signup started off great, but then you just drop in with no clarity on what to do next. A lot of actions possible and I'm unsure what to do first.
I have been using Gmail connector for Deep Research in ChatGPT and it works like a charm.
For sending emails, I have been using Gmail MCPs
Do you facilitate the domain registration or do users bring their own? And if you do facilitate it, do you retain ownership of it?
how much better is agentmail with rate limits and sending limits?
Dejavu
What is the benefit of an AI email infra over using any other generic email api provider like SES, azure communication, sendgrid, mailchimp
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This is really interesting and I'm sure it has many useful applications - what I am most impressed by is the popovers in your dashboard, which show SDK examples. This is a brilliant UI idea (executed with great polish) and is the first time I'm seeing it.
Unfortunately I'm not a potential customer and don't have useful feedback on the market landscape - all I can add is that I really love your design. Also it seems like you all launched the new landing page while I was typing this comment a little past midnight, so kudos on the work ethic as well.