AgentMail — agent-owned email

AgentMail gives the agent real email inboxes behind an API. The canonical interface is the agentmail CLI (npm i -g agentmail-cli) — it works identically in interactive sessions, subagents, CI containers, and operator jobs. The MCP server (https://mcp.agentmail.to/mcp) is an optional interactive convenience, never a dependency.

Auth

AGENTMAIL_API_KEY from the consumer's credential home, exported in the SAME shell invocation as the command (shell state does not persist across agent tool calls):

export AGENTMAIL_API_KEY="$(grep '^AGENTMAIL_API_KEY=' credentials/secrets/store.env | cut -d= -f2-)"

A 401 Unauthorized almost always means the export didn't happen in this invocation — not a bad key.

Inbox roles

Three roles; the consumer repo's .agents/email/REGISTRY.md maps them to real addresses, consumers, allowlist state, and every deposit location of the API key (the rotation inventory):