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Launch HN: AgentMail (YC S25) – An API that gives agents their own email inboxes

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Re: Launch HN: AgentMail (YC S25) – An API that gives agents their own email inboxes

#71
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This refers to B2B use cases that are live in production. Finding, contacting, and negotiating with vendors is a tedious process in many industries. In the time a human reaches out to 10 vendors, an agent reaches out to 100 or 1000. So it finds deals that a human would not have.

But if you hire ten or 100 real humans you have accountability and the same number of contacts per day? Are logistics companies really that poor so they cannot afford to pay workers wages?

By that logic why send email newsletters when I could hire 10 or 100 people email them manually instead? Obviously there's a cost tradeoff here where it's worth it to have email negotiation in an automated way, but not in a human call center way.

Re: Launch HN: AgentMail (YC S25) – An API that gives agents their own email inboxes

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because we built the same inbox infrastructure as Gmail. Inboxes have threads, threads have messages, messages have attachments. You can search, label, filter, reply, forward. None of this comes out of the box with SES.

Couldn't someone just ask Claude Code to make an email system with threads/messages and handle attachments? Doesn't seem like a particularly difficult problem to solve.

Harder than you would expect! Since we tried this ourselves before switching to Agentmail. Threads, attachments, ccing, DNS management, sending to gmail vs outlook vs yahoo, etc. It add up to be a major pain.

Re: Launch HN: AgentMail (YC S25) – An API that gives agents their own email inboxes

#73

> Email is an optimal interface for long-running agents. 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

We build "long running" email agents. But it's not really long running in the sense of an agent taking 1000's of actions in a giant loop.

It's more "long running" because the agent takes 4 steps, then waits a week for the user to email it back. We might have a successful client exchange that takes a month, but for the Agent it's 99% just waiting for the next user reply.

Re: Launch HN: AgentMail (YC S25) – An API that gives agents their own email inboxes

#75
The moat for SaaS is gone.

I am 99% certain I could build to parity in a weekend using Cloudflare without the the pricing limitations.

I am thinking it would be within the free tier of CF usage.

I am not certain I have the bandwidth to communicate over delivery and plain text inspection concerns.

Re: Launch HN: AgentMail (YC S25) – An API that gives agents their own email inboxes

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because we built the same inbox infrastructure as Gmail. Inboxes have threads, threads have messages, messages have attachments. You can search, label, filter, reply, forward. None of this comes out of the box with SES.

Couldn't someone just ask Claude Code to make an email system with threads/messages and handle attachments? Doesn't seem like a particularly difficult problem to solve.

The new HN “but why pay for this if I could build this in a weekend”!

Re: Launch HN: AgentMail (YC S25) – An API that gives agents their own email inboxes

#80

The moat for SaaS is gone. I am 99% certain I could build to parity in a weekend using Cloudflare without the the pricing limitations. I am thinking it would be within the free tier of CF usage. I am not certain I have the bandwidth to communicate over delivery and plain text inspection concerns.

Exactly this ... tools like Claude Code have flattened the complexity curve of building/maintaining things like this to practically zero.
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