January 29, 2026
You’ve got mail… and meltdown
Launch HN: AgentMail (YC S25) – An API that gives agents their own email inboxes
HN loves AI with inboxes, roasts WebGL, and a rival says 'we did it first'
TLDR: AgentMail lets developers give AI bots real email inboxes for long, complex tasks. Commenters loved the two-factor code use-case but roasted a crashy site and questioned “WebGL for email,” while a rival plugged their own link—leaving hype, skepticism, and “do voice and SMS next” as the day’s mood.
AgentMail just dropped the wild pitch: not “AI for your email,” but email for your AI. The startup says giving bots real inboxes makes them better at long, messy tasks—think files, threads, identity, and all that context living in email. They’re offering dev-friendly tools to spin up inboxes, parse attachments, and search across messages, with usage-based pricing. In short: your software gets an address and starts emailing like a person. Demo? YouTube. They built it because Gmail’s rules—rate caps, sign-ins for every inbox, and clunky search—made bots feel like second-class citizens. Plus per-seat pricing didn’t fit an army of agents.
HN reaction: Half the crowd is hype. One builder cheered the 2FA (two-factor security codes) use-case, saying they hacked it with Zapier but it was slow—this could be cleaner. Then the roast: a commenter hit the site and got a client-side crash, asking, “Why does an email website need WebGL?” Cue cookie errors and eye-rolls. Security worriers warned, “Don’t leak those bot addresses—phishing will feast.” Meanwhile, a rival dropped [ai-chat.email] and basically said, “Same idea, déjà vu,” stirring YC-versus-everyone vibes. And the feature wishlist started: “Now do voice and SMS!” It’s equal parts applause, side-eye, and competitive shade—the perfect HN cocktail.
Key Points
- •AgentMail launches an API that provides dedicated email inboxes for AI agents.
- •Email is positioned as an optimal, asynchronous interface with identity and rich content for long-running agent tasks.
- •Gmail’s limitations (no programmatic inbox creation, rate limits, per-inbox OAuth, weak contextual search, per-seat pricing) motivated building AgentMail.
- •AgentMail features include domain configuration, email parsing/threading, text extraction from attachments, realtime webhooks/WebSockets, and semantic search.
- •The platform uses usage-based pricing and is already deployed by developers, startups, and enterprises for data extraction, negotiation, and model training use cases.