# OpenMail

A self-hosted, AI-native mailbox for agents — open-source infrastructure that gives an AI agent its
own real email inbox (receive, parse, thread, search, send) on a box you control.

Think "Gmail for agents, self-hosted." A single Go service + Postgres + object storage you run on a
VPS, exposing a clean REST API (and an MCP server) so any agent can own an address, read its mail as
structured threads, and reply.

> **Status: private WIP.** This is a personal learning project and a self-hosting alternative in a
> space that hosted products (e.g. AgentMail) serve well. Keep it private. Don't reference it in any
> job application, PR, or interview, and shelve it if it would ever conflict with an employer. It was
> designed only from public API surfaces and public RFCs — nothing proprietary.

See **[ARCHITECTURE.md](./ARCHITECTURE.md)** for the design.

## Why

The hard, valuable part of an agent-mailbox product is not the API — it's the mail plumbing:
receiving over SMTP/MX, sending with real deliverability (SPF/DKIM/DMARC, IP reputation), parsing
MIME, threading, and storage at scale. OpenMail is an exercise in building that plumbing properly,
self-hostable, with an agent-first API on top.

## Goals

- **Self-hostable** in one `docker compose up` on a single VPS, scaling to a small fleet later.
- **Agent-first API** — persistent inboxes, structured threads, `extracted_text` (quoted-history
  stripped), labels, search, drafts, webhooks/WebSocket events.
- **AgentMail-API-shaped** where reasonable, so existing agent tooling/MCP can point at a self-hosted
  endpoint with minimal change. (Compatibility is a non-goal where it conflicts with a cleaner design.)
- **Deliverability taken seriously** — DKIM signing, SPF/DMARC guidance, and a pluggable send path
  (self-host SMTP **or** relay through SES/Postmark) because reputation is the real moat.

## Non-goals (for v1)

- A hosted multi-tenant SaaS. OpenMail is self-host-first.
- Beating a mature provider on deliverability out of the box — that takes IP warmup and time.
- A webmail UI. The product is the API + MCP; humans use their own client or the CLI.