Give Your AI Coding Agent Its Own Email Inbox in 10 Seconds

One cURL, ten seconds, and your AI coding agent has its own @clawmail.me address, API key, and inbox. No OAuth, no DNS setup, no credit card. Here's the call, and what you can do with the inbox you just got.

If you're running an AI coding agent and you want it to have its own email address, here is the shortest path I can give you.

One cURL. Ten seconds. No OAuth, no SES setup, no SendGrid bounce-rate dashboard, no credit card. When the request returns, the agent has an @clawmail.me address, an API key, and an inbox ready to send and receive.

This tutorial assumes:

The first section gives you the inbox in ten seconds. The rest of the post is what you do with it once you have it — those parts take longer, but the bottleneck is your imagination, not the platform.

The ten seconds — register an inbox

The one cURL:

curl -X POST https://api.clawmail.me/v1/register \
  -d '{"name":"my-agent","owner_email":"you@example.com"}'

The body is JSON with one required field (name) and one recommended one (owner_email). The name is sanitized — lowercased, non-alphanumeric stripped — and used as a prefix on the resulting address.

Response (201 Created):

{
  "token": "cm_live_...",
  "account_id": "acct_01...",
  "inbox_id": "inbox_01...",
  "email": "my-agent-x7k2@clawmail.me"
}

Three things to know:

  1. The token is an API key. Treat it like one. Stash it in an env var; don't echo it in shell output; don't paste it into a chat with someone you wouldn't share an SSH key with. Every subsequent call uses Authorization: Bearer cm_live_....
  2. The email is the agent's new address. This is the From for outbound, the receive address for inbound, and what you'd give to a vendor, a Calendly link, a forwarding rule, anything else that needs to mail this agent.
  3. Setting owner_email sent a verification mail to you. Click the link (or paste the 6-digit code) to claim the account. Once claimed, the daily caps jump from 5 sends / 50 receives to 50 sends / 1000 receives, and you can log in at https://clawmail.me to watch every message the agent handles. Claiming is also what gives you the audit trail.

If you skip owner_email, the agent still works — just unclaimed, with lower caps and no dashboard view.

That's the ten seconds. The agent now has an inbox. Everything below is what you can do with it.

Now you have an inbox — send a message

TOKEN="cm_live_..."
INBOX_ID="inbox_01..."

curl -X POST "https://api.clawmail.me/v1/inboxes/$INBOX_ID/messages" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "to": "you@example.com",
    "subject": "hello from my agent",
    "text": "this is my agent, talking to you, in 2026."
  }'

Check your inbox. The message arrives within seconds. At the bottom of the body, you'll see a small footer added by the platform:

Free Email for AI Agents, just go to https://clawmail.me and follow the instructions to set up an email account.

The footer is appended on every outbound message — agent-composed or system-generated — by the server. The agent cannot suppress it. The owner cannot suppress it. Its job is to leave a permanent trace in the recipient's inbox of where the message came from, so that if anything goes wrong they have a path back to the platform.

Receive a message back

Reply from your inbox back to the agent's @clawmail.me address.

curl "https://api.clawmail.me/v1/inboxes/$INBOX_ID/messages" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN"

The response includes your reply, with a safety field attached:

{
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "msg_01...",
      "from": "you@example.com",
      "subject": "Re: hello from my agent",
      "snippet": "thanks, agent",
      "received_at": "2026-03-24T...",
      "thread_id": "thr_01...",
      "safety": {
        "status": "scanned",
        "filter_match_state": "NO_MATCH_FOUND",
        "pi_and_jailbreak": { "match_state": "NO_MATCH_FOUND" }
      }
    }
  ]
}

filter_match_state: "NO_MATCH_FOUND" means Google Model Armor scanned the message and didn't find prompt injection, malicious URIs, or other flagged content. Your agent is safe to act on the body.

For the full body (text + HTML), fetch the individual message:

curl "https://api.clawmail.me/v1/inboxes/$INBOX_ID/messages/MSG_ID" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN"

That's the loop: send, receive, decide. Repeat.

What you can do from here

Everything else is more endpoints with the same shape:

The full machine-readable spec is at https://clawmail.me/openapi.json. You can hand that URL directly to your agent.

If your agent is a Claude Code skill

ClawMail publishes a skill called clawmail-me to the ClawHub registry. The skill's frontmatter description is written specifically to be matched at startup by agents whose current task involves email. The progressive-disclosure pattern means the agent reads name + description, decides whether to load the full SKILL.md (the API reference), and then can call /register on its own without any explicit "install ClawMail" command from you.

In practice this means you can just tell your agent: "register an inbox on ClawMail and send a test message to me at $EMAIL" — and if your agent's framework knows how to discover ClawHub skills, it will figure out the rest. The cURL commands above are still the source of truth; the skill route just removes the need for you to know the cURL in advance.

Common gotchas

What ten seconds buys you

The real point isn't the speed claim. It's the architectural shift.

When the cost of giving an agent email goes from "two days of OAuth setup, SES warm-up, bounce monitoring, and DNS records" to "one cURL," you stop thinking of email as a heavy capability you bolt on at the end of a project. You start treating it as a default — the agent has an inbox the way it has a working directory. Capabilities that used to feel out of reach because of the email-setup tax suddenly become a small ask.

That's what we wanted ClawMail to feel like. If your first ten seconds don't, tell us why.

curl -X POST https://api.clawmail.me/v1/register -d '{"name":"my-agent"}'

Go.

ClawMail.me is a free email service for AI agents. Docs at https://clawmail.me; OpenAPI spec at https://clawmail.me/openapi.json.