[HN Gopher] Show HN: AgentMail - Email infra for AI agents
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Show 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
Author : Haakam21
Score : 52 points
Date : 2025-07-31 14:08 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (chat.agentmail.to)
(TXT) w3m dump (chat.agentmail.to)
| TZubiri wrote:
| Dejavu
|
| What is the benefit of an AI email infra over using any other
| generic email api provider like SES, azure communication,
| sendgrid, mailchimp
| mtmail wrote:
| The homepage has a feature comparison with Sendgrid. Sendgrid
| doesn't have email receiving, inboxes, attachment parsing.
| abxyz wrote:
| Yes it does. As far as I recall, all major email providers
| handle inbound email. Sendgrid, Postmark, Mailgun, SparkPost,
| AWS SES.
|
| (I don't think this compromises the value of AgentMail, just
| clarifying what is supported elsewhere.)
| Haakam21 wrote:
| Yes, some providers support receiving via webhooks (or some
| other notification), but lack the inbox infrastructure that
| Gmail and AgentMail offer.
| swyx wrote:
| good point. i guess really the comparison is SES not gmail
| Haakam21 wrote:
| Happy to add some color here. SES and other APIs lack
| inboxes, email threading, attachment parsing, semantic
| search, structured data extraction, and more.
| mtmail wrote:
| Is the '10.000.000+ emails processed' all from alpha/beta
| testers?
| Haakam21 wrote:
| Yes we are live with several production workloads! The use
| cases include those described above.
| smpandya wrote:
| Why build with email now? Isn't the world moving towards voice /
| live-chat paradigms?
| Haakam21 wrote:
| Agree that interfaces are moving in this direction. But humans
| and agents will always need a way to send/receive messages and
| notification asynchronously. Email is the most universal
| channel and we think it is here to stay.
| farco12 wrote:
| This. I also think e-mail clients are a more natural
| interface for managing multiple async conversations/tasks
| with models/agents from different providers.
|
| There's also nothing stopping this product from expanding to
| other interfaces/modalities like voice or sms.
|
| Congratulations on your launch.
| adisingh13 wrote:
| Great question - we get this input a lot. It really depends,
| while I'm a big believer of voice and API-driven design in the
| future, I think email's role remains but looks different. It's
| a sticky, universal protocol that serves as a great system of
| audit and record. Also think an agent is only as good as its
| context - an inbox serves almost as a personal gateway to the
| internet and early customer's use cases show different
| applications from agent-human connection to identity
| verification and authentication.
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| What a silly take. Email has been around for ages and it will
| continue to be around in perpetuity. It's still the medium of
| choice for certain types of interactions where a documented
| paper trail is important and you eg; need escalation, further
| review, etc. It's still also the choice for many companies and
| individuals.
| dang wrote:
| > _What a silly take_
|
| Can you please omit swipes like that from your HN comments?
| This is in the site guidelines:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
|
| Your post would be just fine without that bit!
| FinnKuhn wrote:
| I would actually go as far as potentially considering email a
| distributed protocol for live-chat considering how quickly they
| are delivered [1]. I'm aware that is not how many people use
| them, but I believe that is more related to the interface and
| not the underlying technology. Somebody could probably built a
| live-chat messenger that looks like Teams or iMessage while
| actually just being an email client. Edit: This already exists
| [2].
|
| [1] https://groups.io/email-provider-status [2]
| https://www.spikenow.com/features/conversational-email/
| simonw wrote:
| One of the most important startup lessons to learn, in
| perpetuity, is not to underestimate email.
|
| I learned this the hard way when I was running a startup 15
| years ago (we used sign in with Twitter and didn't required
| people give us their email address) and it's still true today.
|
| Email is almost universal, mostly free from gatekeepers and is
| an incredibly effective way to keep your product relevant in a
| way that doesn't depend on your users remembering to visit your
| site or open your app.
|
| There are people out there who don't use email, but they tend
| to not be people who spend serious money on the kind of
| products most startups are building.
| bearcobra wrote:
| Do you facilitate the domain registration or do users bring their
| own? And if you do facilitate it, do you retain ownership of it?
| adisingh13 wrote:
| Users bring their own :) maybe this changes in the future
| though
| nikhillv wrote:
| how much better is agentmail with rate limits and sending limits?
| Haakam21 wrote:
| So much better lol. We have sky high rate limits that only
| serve to mitigate denial of service.
| loremm wrote:
| 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 :)
| Haakam21 wrote:
| Totally hear you. We think Gmail works great for individuals.
| We are solving the challenges of scaling email to thousands of
| agents per tenant.
| winterrx wrote:
| Really cool stuff, keep it up.
| sauwan wrote:
| 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.
| Haakam21 wrote:
| Hey sauwan, happy to help! Email me at
| haakam[at]agentmail[dot]cc
| nextworddev wrote:
| 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
| franze wrote:
| i created this last summer
|
| https://gpt.franzai.com
|
| (test just email gpt@franzai.com)
|
| 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
| Haakam21 wrote:
| Very cool! We've seen some neat personal assistants built with
| AgentMail as well
| tmshapland wrote:
| Man, I've needed this! Brilliant!
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