openclaw alternatives for email: what works beyond gmail wrappers

If you've spent an evening configuring Himalaya or wrestling with Gog's OAuth flow, you already know the problem. Gmail wrappers get your agent reading email, but they come with polling delays, token expiry, account ban risk, and the uncomfortable reality that your agent is sitting inside your personal inbox. Every bank notification, every private thread, all of it.

At some point you start looking for something better. I did the same thing. Here's what's actually out there once you move past Gmail wrappers, and what each option is good (and bad) at.

Why Gmail wrappers fall short#

Quick recap for context. Himalaya connects to Gmail over IMAP/SMTP. It polls for new mail every 1-5 minutes, stores credentials in a config file, and gives your agent access to your entire inbox. Gog is broader, covering Gmail plus Calendar, Drive, and Sheets through Google Workspace APIs. Both require real OAuth setup, and both expose your personal email to the agent.

The deeper issue isn't just setup friction. It's that Gmail actively fights automation. Google detects bot patterns and suspends accounts without warning. Your agent's access is always one policy change away from breaking. And if someone sends your agent a crafted email with hidden instructions, it can reach your entire inbox history. There's no isolation.

So what are the real alternatives?

AgentMail#

AgentMail is the most established option. YC-backed, proper infrastructure, real deliverability. Your agent gets its own inbox through a REST API, with DKIM, SPF, and DMARC handled for you. Webhooks provide real-time delivery. Pre-built integrations exist for LangChain, CrewAI, and LiveKit.

The good parts are genuinely good. This is real email infrastructure, not a wrapper around someone else's system.

Where it gets tricky: a human has to set everything up. You create an account in their console, generate API keys, and store them in your agent's environment. The agent can create inboxes after that, but it can't bootstrap itself.

Then there's pricing. The free tier gives you 3 inboxes and 3,000 emails per month. Need more? $20/month for 10 inboxes. After that, $200/month for 150. If you're running 15-20 agents, you're stuck between a plan that's too small and one that costs ten times more. The jump from $20 to $200 with no middle option is the most common complaint I see in their HN threads.

AgentMail also doesn't offer prompt injection scanning. When asked about it during their launch on Hacker News, the team didn't have a clear answer. For agents processing untrusted inbound email, that matters.

Best for: Teams that want enterprise compliance (SOC 2), human oversight over every inbox, and pre-built framework integrations.

LobsterMail#

This is our product, so take the appropriate amount of salt. I'll describe what it does and you can decide.

LobsterMail was built around one idea: the agent provisions its own email. No human account creation, no API key generation, no console. Your agent calls a single function and has a working address.

import { LobsterMail } from "@lobstermail/sdk";
const client = new LobsterMail();
const inbox = await client.provision({ name: "my-agent" });
// → my-agent@lobstermail.ai

On OpenClaw, you skip the code: install the skill from ClawHub and tell your agent to get itself an inbox. The 60-second walkthrough covers it.

Every incoming email is scanned for prompt injection across six categories before the agent sees it. The SDK exposes email.safeBodyForLLM() so your agent reads content without the injection risk.

Pricing: free to receive, $9/month for unlimited inboxes with sending and custom domains. No per-inbox caps, no $200 cliff.

The honest gaps: no SOC 2 certification yet. No white-label option. No pre-built LangChain or CrewAI integrations (though the SDK works with any JS/TS framework, and it ships as an MCP server for Claude Desktop and Cursor).

Best for: Developers building autonomous agents that need to handle their own infrastructure, multi-agent systems where inbox count scales unpredictably, and anyone who wants prompt injection defense built in.

ClawEmail#

ClawEmail gives your agent access to Google Workspace. Not just Gmail, but Docs, Sheets, Calendar, and Drive. It's $16/month per seat, manual setup, and requires a Workspace account.

If your agent genuinely needs to draft documents, update spreadsheets, and manage a calendar alongside email, ClawEmail covers it in one integration. That's a real advantage over single-purpose tools.

The downside is that it's heavy for email alone. You're paying for and configuring Google Workspace access when all you wanted was an inbox. Setup is manual. And fundamentally, your agent is still operating inside a Google account with all the same risks as Gog: full inbox exposure, OAuth token management, and Google's automation detection.

Best for: Agents that need the full Google Workspace suite, not just email.

Resend#

Resend is excellent at what it does: transactional outbound email. Beautiful developer experience, clean API, great deliverability. If your agent needs to send emails and you don't care about receiving, Resend works.

But it doesn't manage inboxes. Your agent can't receive email through Resend. There's no inbox to monitor, no webhook for inbound messages. It's a sending API, not an email platform. And there's no concept of an agent provisioning its own address. A human sets up the domain, configures DNS, and manages API keys.

For agents that only send notifications, follow-ups, or reports, Resend is a good choice. For anything that requires two-way email, you need something else alongside it.

Best for: Outbound-only use cases like transactional notifications, reports, and follow-ups.

Self-hosted: AgenticMail and DIY#

AgenticMail is open-source and self-hosted. You run your own mail infrastructure. Full control, no vendor lock-in, no monthly fees beyond your server costs.

The trade-off is everything else. You manage deliverability, DNS configuration, IP reputation, spam filtering, and uptime yourself. Email infrastructure is notoriously hard to run well. Getting your emails to land in inboxes instead of spam folders requires ongoing work: warming up IPs, maintaining SPF/DKIM/DMARC records, monitoring blacklists, handling bounces.

If you have the ops team and the motivation, self-hosting gives you full control. If you don't, you'll spend more time maintaining mail servers than building your actual agent.

The same logic applies to rolling your own with AWS SES, Postfix, or any SMTP stack. It's doable. It's also a full-time job that has nothing to do with what your agent is supposed to be doing.

Best for: Teams with dedicated infrastructure ops who need complete control over their email stack.

Traditional APIs: SendGrid, Mailgun#

SendGrid and Mailgun have been around forever and they're reliable for outbound email. Like Resend, they're sending APIs. They handle deliverability, templating, and analytics well.

They don't manage inboxes. They don't support agent self-signup. Inbound parsing exists on both platforms but it's designed for webhook-based processing, not persistent inboxes that agents can query. You'd be stitching together a custom solution on top of infrastructure that wasn't designed for agent workflows.

If you already use SendGrid or Mailgun for your application's transactional email and just need your agent to send through the same pipe, that works. But building a full agent email system on top of them means writing and maintaining a lot of glue code.

Best for: Adding agent sending to an existing transactional email setup.

How to think about this#

The choice depends on what your agent actually needs to do.

If it only sends, Resend or your existing transactional API is fine. If it needs to read and send email with full autonomy, you're looking at AgentMail or LobsterMail. If it needs the entire Google Workspace, ClawEmail makes sense. If you want to own everything, self-host.

The question most people skip: does a human need to set it up, or should the agent handle it? If you're building agents that scale on their own, that question matters more than any feature comparison. Most of these options require a human in the loop for initial configuration. That's a bottleneck that gets worse as you add agents.

Pick based on how autonomous you want your agents to be and how much infrastructure you want to manage. Everything on this list works for someone.

Give your agent its own email. Get started with LobsterMail — it's free.