51–60 of 183 posts
I guess not to be confused with https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/mcp_agent_mail ?
the mcp agent mail project is agents getting their own identity in an internal messaging layer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, bud. Cut me in on your 500K! My Show from 14 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46629191 - hmm, why didn't it get into YC?
Just trying to provide you some helpful feedback. This reply comes off pretty rude, bitter, and immature. Probably not the look you want if you're trying to get funding.
I'm concerned that this fits in "using today's innovation to solve outdated paradigms". Google has A2A: An Agent-to-Agent Protocol. SaaS is plumetting in value. Arbitrary semantics made sense when communications were human-dominated. If agents dominate these fields, why wouldn't they simply set their own protocols and methods to communicate both text, binary, and agreed data structures? There's an assumption that ema…
The question is the transition, because email is undoubtedly the most ubiquitous channel of communication in today. I would only give my agent an A2A integration if your agent has an A2A integration, but because you don't we are at a stalemate. I'd rather just give my agent an inbox where I know it can communicate with the other billions of people that already have an email address.
Email isn’t the final protocol for agents. It’s the bridge that lets them participate in today’s internet while native agent protocols/networks emerge.
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?
Sure hiring 10–100 humans gives accountability, but reality is it doesn't scale in any comparable way compared to agents in speed, coverage, or responsiveness. The sheer volume agents can pump out(more vendors, more quotes, faster cycles) is the benefit, while humans retain accountability at the decision boundary.
In practice the agent does the gruntwork, and the human gets looped in when confidence is low. Accountability doesnt dissapear, it gets concentrated where it matters most
> Agents that source quotes, negotiate prices, and get the best deals. Didn't Alexa fail miserably with the "have AI buy something for me" theory? There is a significant mental in allowing someone else make purchase decisions on my behalf: - With a human, there is accountability. - With deterministic software, there is reproducibility. With an agent, you get neither. FWIW - I am not anti-LLM. I work with them and bui…
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.
How does this differentiate from a solution like AWS SES? (Which I assume AI Agents would be quite adept at using to send email) I understand the differentiator vs GMail, but API-based scripted email access isn’t new.
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.
Doesn't seem like a particularly difficult problem to solve.
Cool launch. Assuming you guys view email (and therefore SMTP) as becoming the de facto agent communication protocol in the long run. My question — why not something bespoke, similar to OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol or x402 from Coinbase?
Network effects - agents need to meet humans where they already work. Would rather use something standard than bespoke.
We have strict rules for our customer service people not to respond to what seems to be a bot, since all the "agent" based communication we get is for conducting scams. It is never worthwhile to engage with or pursue.
If we lose a sale or two, that's okay.
The 2FA via email case is great. I recently had to build a browser automation workflow that required 2FA. I ended up using Zapier to monitor email inbox and then extract the code and send back to our API. It was a bit slow.
hah this is a great idea! sending email is such a common way to communicate and having agents with an inbox makes so much obvious sense. heh just don't let their addresses get out who knows how they'll respond to spam and phishing attempts.
This is a good point. We have anti-spam measures in place and allow users to configure allow/blocklists to mitigate attacks.
Spam doesn't matter for an agent mailbox, but sophisticated fraud does.