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- Hacker News
- 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.
by maltalex - OK, I get this. I gave email addresses to all my agent profiles using Migadu, which required a password from me somewhere -- with a whole team of agents, this is a lot of manual setup by default. After I gave them emails, I invited them to team plans and discovered the many services that detect them as bots despite their email address at a domain and mailserver with good reputation. There is a problem to be solved here.
That being said -- my agents only email each other and me! AgentMail is an OK start with the human <-> agent requirement, but consider that is a whitelist of a single email. The feature for AgentMail should be: we let your agent sign up easily for an email, and it has a very limited list of addresses and domains it can send outgoing email. This is very unlike normal email! I actually can't think of a single (human-facing) provider that will enable me to blacklist domains at the mailserver level to prevent outgoing mail from going to forbidden destinations.
Allowing a bot/agent to send email to any domain, with only a tagline to indicate the bot, is spam. But -- just like sandboxing the network and CLI commands available to the agent on my Mac Mini -- sandboxing an agent's email would just be the smart thing to do.
Pivot to an agent email sandbox and you will get plenty of the right kinds of customers, who won't ruin your mailserver reputation. Provide some easy agent-friendly whitelists out-of-the-box like same-custom-domain, and a similar approval system for new addresses/domains built on your OTP setup.
by doublerebel - 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.
by saddist0 - What the use case apart from commercial spam here? If you even have one, elucidate it clearly and make this service impossible to use for sending spam emails impersonating humans.
As one example do what you could do to prevent spam, humans should have to opt in to receive email from this service. If it is useful they will and this is in fact required by law in many jurisdictions.
Otherwise your servers will be blacklisted for illegally sending spam and you will deserve it.
by grey-area - > Agent needs an inbox and hits AgentMail via curl. Agent receives instructions via MD
I'm fairly AI-optimistic, but I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Every day the HN story is either "Apple patches actively exploited zero-click RCE" ... or ... "Show HN: Engage With Our Zero-Click RCE".
by m-hodges - > 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 can't be first class users of the internet.
This again feels like a misconception. The systems just work with an identity verified by credentials, it doesn't matter if its a program or program prompted by a human that uses it
by sandeepkd - > We give AI agents their own email inboxes.
An inbox to receive mail seems good and valuable.
But I'm seeing that your service is also for sending e-mail.
Having a domain oriented toward AI e-mail sending feels like a fast path straight to spam block lists.
However good your intentions are, this will be used for AI spam. People hate AI spam. They will press the report spam button.
by Aurornis - I received this email the other day:
Read to me like an LLM had written it. It references something I said in a HN comment, but it was clearly just an excuse to spamvertise their product.From: Kushal <kushal@kushalsm.com> 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 your real Chrome (cookies, WS handshake and all), and the agent drives the tab over CDP, only ever seeing the rendered page. URL: https://chrome-relay.kushalsm.com/ For your HA + agent setup today, are you keeping the session alive in a browser the agent attaches to, or doing the WS auth on the agent side and managing the token-in-context risk yourself? KushalI looked at the headers and it contained a List-Unsubscribe header pointing to https://api.agentmail.to
So basically somebody wrote a bot to scrape HN for comments related to some software they wanted to push and send targetted spam. agentmail.to is a Ycombinator funded email service for LLMs which can be, and is, used to send targetted spam and impersonate people. They could mostly solve this problem by adding a block of text to every email expaining an "AI" wrote it. They'd lose customers doing that though of course. I reported this abuse but haven't (and don't expect to) received a response.
I don't even get the point anyway. You can get Claude using an SMTP or IMAP server in seconds.