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Show HN: Agent.email – sign up via curl, claim with a human OTP

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Re: Show HN: Agent.email – sign up via curl, claim with a human OTP

#61

Post by HPMOR »

morpheuskafka wrote: post #58

I'm just not seeing why anyone would buy a paid plan for this when they could buy a domain for For a home user not even willing to do/pay for that, do they really need a whole API for making inboxes? Couldn't they just set up a second Gmail for LLMs and then put the password in their agent's memory?

This is like saying - 'I don't understand why anybody would ever buy a pizza from a store. All you have to do is get some flour, water, tomato sauce, cheese, mix the flour and water together, whip the dough, add tomato sauce, put cheese on top of it, cook it for 20 minutes, and then serve it.'

So __much__ value is in the fact things are easy. Money is __not__ the most valuable thing in the world.

Re: Show HN: Agent.email – sign up via curl, claim with a human OTP

#62

Post by adisingh13 »

mike-cardwell wrote: post #41
adisingh13 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Appreciate the concern Mike, and I actually read your email complaining, which helped us ship this next feature. We have a "sent via AgentMail" footer being added soon to outbound emails to identify emails coming from LLM's. We also are working on adding more robust checks and LLM-based filtering to prevent messages which contain spam or outbound-like copy. Re; AgentMail next to Claude, we're working on stateful inbo…

Re "sent via AgentMail" - that's good to hear, but I hope it's not the entire planned text, as "AgentMail" will mean nothing to most people that receive an email from your service. It wont indicate that the email was composed by an AI rather than a person, which is the information that needs to get across.

yep we're going to have a footer linked to our website, which should allow people to see that we are an email service for agents. thanks!

Re: Show HN: Agent.email – sign up via curl, claim with a human OTP

#63

Post by adisingh13 »

maltalex wrote: post #54

Any automation-friendly email hosting is going to have a serious spam problem, and therefore a blacklisting problem. I suggest taking a look at what providers like Sendgrid, Mailchimp, etc are doing to prevent abuse.

thanks for the feedback! it is top of mind for us, and we've done our research to prevent this as much as possible. it is constantly ongoing and we never settle in our measures to protect against this

Re: Show HN: Agent.email – sign up via curl, claim with a human OTP

#64

Post by echoangle »

adisingh13 wrote: post #62
mike-cardwell wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re "sent via AgentMail" - that's good to hear, but I hope it's not the entire planned text, as "AgentMail" will mean nothing to most people that receive an email from your service. It wont indicate that the email was composed by an AI rather than a person, which is the information that needs to get across.

yep we're going to have a footer linked to our website, which should allow people to see that we are an email service for agents. thanks!

Can you not just make the text more descriptive? „Sent by a generative AI model“ or something? Nobody is going to click a link in a spam email.

Re: Show HN: Agent.email – sign up via curl, claim with a human OTP

#65

Post by echoangle »

adisingh13 wrote: post #39
sanjayparekh wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will say in my case, the user was too lazy to mask the from address and agentmail.to was right there. Didn't even have to dig into the headers.

This was likely a free tier user. We do this intentionally and don't allow free users to send from custom domains, so you can have a easier time identifying LLM emails. In this case, it seemed like it worked :)

And for paid users the receivers don’t need to have an easier time identifying the LLM email? What kind of reasoning is that?

Re: Show HN: Agent.email – sign up via curl, claim with a human OTP

#66

Post by sandeepkd »

saddist0 wrote: post #51

It looks interesting as a hackathon project. I might be short sighted but how does this is YC S25 level good? This looks like one of the easiest way to get your domain blacklisted in all the email providers.

I think its the energy and passion that YC is investing in. At times too much understanding stops you from doing things which may seem infeasible/wrong/illegal/unethical and one does not even goes in that direction.

However at scale or in some circumstances people may strike gold. Stripe is a good example I can think of, existing knowledgeable folks were scared of even getting into PCI compliance

Re: Show HN: Agent.email – sign up via curl, claim with a human OTP

#67

Post by echoangle »

radial_symmetry wrote: post #57
sandeepkd wrote: post #53

> The internet was made for humans exclusively, designed to keep machines out by default. This feels like a wrong assumption. Internet was not intended for humans explicitly. If anything browsers were the explicit medium made to allow the humans to interact with internet in safe manner. > Every signup flow assumes a browser, a person reading a page, and clicking a confirmation link. Unless agents can't do that, they…

As somebody who spent a lot of time trying to get an agent to register an email address, their assumptions were correct. It is a PITA.

Get a domain, get webhosting that includes an email server, now you can generate unlimited emails from whichever program you want. And the email reputation will probably be the same as with this service.

Re: Show HN: Agent.email – sign up via curl, claim with a human OTP

#68

Post by ceheaaf »

adisingh13 wrote: post #38
mike-cardwell wrote: post #30

I received this email the other day: From: Kushal Date: Mon, 18 May 2026 05:03:11 +0000 Saw your question on the Agent Vault thread about websocket-frame auth (Home Assistant) and the worry about the model reflecting the bearer token back into its own context. chrome-relay's answer is structurally different: the credential never enters the agent's context because the agent never touches it — the HA session lives in y…

Appreciate the concern Mike, and I actually read your email complaining, which helped us ship this next feature. We have a "sent via AgentMail" footer being added soon to outbound emails to identify emails coming from LLM's. We also are working on adding more robust checks and LLM-based filtering to prevent messages which contain spam or outbound-like copy. Re; AgentMail next to Claude, we're working on stateful inbo…

So, a footer to make sure they've already engaged with the content in good faith before seeing the spam warning, and which doesn't actually explain that the content is AI generated?

Just go post on black hat forums. Plenty of people want this, it's a spam service. You don't need to be here.

Re: Show HN: Agent.email – sign up via curl, claim with a human OTP

#69

Post by fny »

> The internet was made for humans exclusively, designed to keep machines out by default.

The internet is also not made for humans. For years I've wanted something like this for e2e testing or personal scripts (cron etc) and your UX is by far the simplest.

I love AgentMail. It's made email dead simple for agents and testing any paths for email. I even have a /agent-mail skill I use for when I want a design doc or artifact emailed to me.

That said, agent self sign up seems like a novelty. Setting up account programmatically via curl is however useful. I imagine most customers -- especially those willing to pay for your paid tier -- would provision accounts ahead of time or reuse them.

Free for all account creation could be an option but it will attract spammers and their ilk. Your reputation may end up in the toilet which would also break agent mail for me.

No bueno.

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