6 ms·

Give your AI agent a real email address (open source, Cloudflare)

4 points by genedai 6mo ago

genedai 6mo ago
I've been building AI agents for the past year, and I kept running into the same problem: my agent couldn't sign up for anything. It needed to create accounts, which means receiving verification codes. It needed to send reports. It needed to check inboxes. Every time, I'd hack something together. Resend for sending (but it can't receive). Gmail API with its OAuth setup that takes half an hour. Or just... doing it by hand. So I built mails-agent. The idea is simple. Give your agent a real email address, the same way you'd give it a tool or an API key. npm install -g mails-agent mails claim myagent mails code --to myagent@mails0.com --timeout 60 That last command waits for a verification code to arrive and prints it. Your agent can now sign up for things on its own. I've spent years building products for people. This is the first time I'm building something for agents, and honestly it's the most fun I've had in a long time. It's a completely different mindset. You're not thinking about UI or attention spans. You're thinking about reliability, programmability, zero friction. Everything is an API call. It just needs to work. A couple of things I'm happy with: 1. It runs entirely on Cloudflare's free tier (Workers + D1 + R2 + Email Routing). I wanted this to cost $0. Charging per mailbox felt wrong for something agents need as a basic capability. 2. It works as an MCP server, so Claude Desktop and Cursor can use it directly: npx mails-agent-mcp MIT licensed. Self-hostable. Deploy to your own Cloudflare account with your own domain, or claim a free @mails0.com mailbox to try it. I'd love to hear what you'd use this for. I built it for the signup and verify use case, but I think there are agent email patterns I haven't thought of yet. Demo: https://mails0.com
- adisingh13 6mo ago
  nice, we're working on agentmail so i think we have similar ideas. its a big problem!
  - genedai 6mo ago
    That discomfort of letting an agent touch your personal inbox was actually the core insight for me. You lose visibility into what it's doing, and mixing agent actions with human mail is just a recipe for confusion. An agent should have its own identity, its own address, its own inbox. Would love to see where you're taking agentmail — are you focused more on the agent-as-sender side, or agent-as-receiver (verification codes, inbound parsing, etc.)?

4 points by genedai 6mo ago

I've been building AI agents for the past year, and I kept running into the same problem: my agent couldn't sign up for anything. It needed to create accounts, which means receiving verification codes. It needed to send reports. It needed to check inboxes. Every time, I'd hack something together. Resend for sending (but it can't receive). Gmail API with its OAuth setup that takes half an hour. Or just... doing it by hand. So I built mails-agent. The idea is simple. Give your agent a real email address, the same way you'd give it a tool or an API key. npm install -g mails-agent mails claim myagent mails code --to myagent@mails0.com --timeout 60 That last command waits for a verification code to arrive and prints it. Your agent can now sign up for things on its own. I've spent years building products for people. This is the first time I'm building something for agents, and honestly it's the most fun I've had in a long time. It's a completely different mindset. You're not thinking about UI or attention spans. You're thinking about reliability, programmability, zero friction. Everything is an API call. It just needs to work. A couple of things I'm happy with: 1. It runs entirely on Cloudflare's free tier (Workers + D1 + R2 + Email Routing). I wanted this to cost $0. Charging per mailbox felt wrong for something agents need as a basic capability. 2. It works as an MCP server, so Claude Desktop and Cursor can use it directly: npx mails-agent-mcp MIT licensed. Self-hostable. Deploy to your own Cloudflare account with your own domain, or claim a free @mails0.com mailbox to try it. I'd love to hear what you'd use this for. I built it for the signup and verify use case, but I think there are agent email patterns I haven't thought of yet. Demo: https://mails0.com

adisingh13 6mo ago
nice, we're working on agentmail so i think we have similar ideas. its a big problem!
- genedai 6mo ago
  That discomfort of letting an agent touch your personal inbox was actually the core insight for me. You lose visibility into what it's doing, and mixing agent actions with human mail is just a recipe for confusion. An agent should have its own identity, its own address, its own inbox. Would love to see where you're taking agentmail — are you focused more on the agent-as-sender side, or agent-as-receiver (verification codes, inbound parsing, etc.)?