Launch HN: AgentMail (YC S25) – An API that gives agents their own email inboxes
by Haakam21 on 1/29/2026, 4:42:33 PM
Hey HN, we're Haakam, Michael, and Adi. We're building AgentMail (<a href="https://agentmail.to">https://agentmail.to</a>), the email inbox API for agents. We’re not talking about AI for your email, this is email for your AI.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Here's demo of Clawdbots communicating using AgentMail: <a href="https://youtu.be/Y0MfUWS3LKQ" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/Y0MfUWS3LKQ</a><p>You can get started with AgentMail for free at <a href="https://agentmail.to">https://agentmail.to</a><p>Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback.
Comments
by: pizzafeelsright
The moat for SaaS is gone.<p>I am 99% certain I could build to parity in a weekend using Cloudflare without the the pricing limitations.<p>I am thinking it would be within the free tier of CF usage.<p>I am not certain I have the bandwidth to communicate over delivery and plain text inspection concerns.
1/29/2026, 8:00:06 PM
by: suriya-ganesh
Interesting take, but this feels like one of those tarpit ideas that YC discourages their portco to start attacking.<p>Guaranteed this is going to attract a ton of abusers who are looking to use this for signing up to services, spamming or other nefarious purposes, which then blacklists the doman. This is an infinite whack-a-mole.<p>do you guys have some ways of handling it?
1/29/2026, 8:14:51 PM
by: petervandijck
A pricing thought: if you keep the volume limits but do 10x the amount of inboxes per plan, I think that could be more attractive. For If I have 100s of agents that send limited email each.
1/29/2026, 8:08:38 PM
by: pirsquare
excellent idea, this will eventually be the SendGrid for email agents. Just automating 2FA alone is worth the gold. And there's tons of use cases.<p>I have no doubt this will be huge.
1/29/2026, 8:16:47 PM
by: MattDaEskimo
I'm concerned that this fits in "using today's innovation to solve outdated paradigms".<p>Google has A2A: An Agent-to-Agent Protocol. SaaS is plumetting in value.<p>Arbitrary semantics made sense when communications were human-dominated.<p>If agents dominate these fields, why wouldn't they simply set their own protocols and methods to communicate both text, binary, and agreed data structures?<p>There's an assumption that email is somehow the best channel, when you've found yourself that the most popular, functional interfaces don't align with your expectations.<p>Then, ultimately I have a single agent that can sit in numerous communication platforms, such as email
1/29/2026, 6:30:41 PM
by: smpandya
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?
1/29/2026, 5:26:59 PM
by: biddit
> Agents that source quotes, negotiate prices, and get the best deals.<p>Didn't Alexa fail miserably with the "have AI buy something for me" theory?<p>There is a significant mental in allowing someone else make purchase decisions on my behalf:<p>- With a human, there is accountability.<p>- With deterministic software, there is reproducibility.<p>With an agent, you get neither.<p>FWIW - I am not anti-LLM. I work with them and build them full time.
1/29/2026, 5:46:10 PM
by: Jayakumark
If you know agents email address, it can still be Prompt Injected.. what prevention exists there ?
1/29/2026, 8:01:36 PM
by: jessechoe10
This is super interesting. Interesting to see how I'll be able to use this to help my customers with handling email responses. Gmail sucks for this. Super excited to see what you guys develop this into. Will this be able to eventually expand to other forms of agent communication (i.e. payment or phone numbers)?
1/29/2026, 7:31:08 PM
by: rippeltippel
Finally agents can spam other agents, instead of humans.
1/29/2026, 5:18:09 PM
by: nerdsniper
How does this differentiate from a solution like AWS SES? (Which I assume AI Agents would be quite adept at using to send email)<p>I understand the differentiator vs GMail, but API-based scripted email access isn’t new.
1/29/2026, 5:46:30 PM
by: wild_egg
> Email is an optimal interface for long-running agents.<p>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
1/29/2026, 5:58:00 PM
by: lucasayb97
It’s a really nice idea actually. There will be some concerns, maybe some mistakes, but it really works as a mean to communicate much easier with an agent
1/29/2026, 7:08:35 PM
by: throw03172019
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.
1/29/2026, 4:53:52 PM
by: mrklol
Looks like SES + api access, isn’t Amazon offering that already?
1/29/2026, 6:48:23 PM
by: umrashrf
So AgentMail uses Mail Agent
1/29/2026, 6:33:21 PM
by:
1/29/2026, 7:43:15 PM
by: chasd00
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.
1/29/2026, 5:02:43 PM
by: ritomsen09
How do you think this will help with identity verification in the future?
1/29/2026, 5:48:12 PM
by: pbronez
Very interesting. I have a lot of enterprise AI use cases that would really benefit from being email native.<p>We’re an O365 GCC shop. Appreciate that your enterprise options include Bring Your Own Cloud, that makes things much easier for us.<p>It would be nice to have integrations with n8n and Glean.
1/29/2026, 5:29:45 PM
by: alongub
AgentMail looks amazing!
1/29/2026, 5:33:34 PM
by: wild_egg
I guess not to be confused with <a href="https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/mcp_agent_mail" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/mcp_agent_mail</a>?
1/29/2026, 5:45:45 PM
by: dbushell
Dead internet theory.
1/29/2026, 5:50:39 PM
by: waynenilsen
amazing now do the same for voice and sms!
1/29/2026, 5:05:29 PM
by: blobber2001
[dead]
1/29/2026, 7:07:22 PM
by: keepamovin
Hey I’m also working on this what a coincidence: <a href="https://ai-chat.email" rel="nofollow">https://ai-chat.email</a><p>Second time at least HN is launching YC on one of my products:<p>BrowserBox - hyperbeam<p>Mailpilot/AI-chat.email - agentnail
1/29/2026, 5:04:43 PM
by: rootnod3
"Application error: a client-side exception has occurred while loading www.agentmail.to (see the browser console for more information)."<p>> Looks at developer console...<p>- "Failed to create WebGL context: WebGL is currently disabled." Dafuq does an email website need WebGL for?<p>- "Cookie “dmn_chk_xxxxxxxx-yyyy-dead-beef-123456789ABC” has been rejected for invalid domain."<p>Let me guess...vibe-coded?
1/29/2026, 4:56:58 PM
by: HarryDu
In the future all the agent communication will be using agentmail!
1/29/2026, 5:06:02 PM
by: kushbhuwalka
lets goooo
1/29/2026, 5:28:28 PM