How I built an email inbox for AI agents (OTP, bulk sending, and marketing emails)

if you've ever tried to make an AI agent fully autonomous, you've hit this wall: the agent needs to log into something, and boom, there's a 2FA/OTP email waiting. the agent has no inbox. it can't read emails. your whole automation just... stops. i ran into this exact problem and ended up building AgentMailr to solve it. here's what i learned and where it's going. the core problem most AI agent setups treat email as an afterthought. you can send emails fine, but receiving them in a way that's agent-friendly is a pain. IMAP polling adds latency and burns context. scraping webmail is fragile. forwarding to a webhook works but means you have to build and maintain the correlation logic yourself. what i really wanted was something like this: const otp = await inbox . waitForOtp ({ timeout : 60000 }) one call. blocks until the email arrives. returns the code. done. how it works each agent gets a real email address (like my-agent@agentmailr.com ). when an email arrives, we parse it across plai