openclaw email options compared: himalaya, gog, agentmail, and lobstermail

Every OpenClaw user hits the same wall. Your agent can browse the web, push code to GitHub, and manage your calendar. Then you ask it to send an email, and suddenly you're deep in OAuth scopes, IMAP configs, and Google Cloud Pub/Sub documentation on a Tuesday night.

There are four real options for giving your OpenClaw agent email. Each solves the problem differently, and each has tradeoffs nobody mentions in the setup tutorials. I've tested all of them. Here's what I found.

The Gmail wrappers: Himalaya and Gog#

Most OpenClaw users start here because Gmail is right there and both skills install from ClawHub in seconds.

Himalaya is a CLI email client that connects to Gmail over IMAP/SMTP. It's the most popular email skill on ClawHub. You configure your credentials in ~/.config/himalaya/config.toml, and your agent runs shell commands to read, send, and manage messages. Simple enough on paper.

In practice, Himalaya has friction. IMAP polling means your agent checks for new mail every 1-5 minutes instead of getting it instantly. OAuth2 setup requires generating credentials through Google Cloud Console, and users on r/openclaw regularly report errors where the agent can't find the Himalaya tool even after the CLI works fine. The skill's own GitHub issues list incorrect command syntax in the documentation. And IMAP stores your password in a config file, which is one leaked .env away from someone reading your entire inbox.

Gog is the Google Workspace mega-skill. Gmail, Calendar, Drive, all in one package. If you're already paying for Google Workspace ($6-18/month per seat), Gog gives your agent the full suite. The trade-off is complexity. Setup requires the gogcli authentication tool, a GCP project with billing enabled, and OAuth scoping. If you want real-time email (not polling), you also need Google Cloud Pub/Sub with a public webhook endpoint.

One user in OpenClaw Discussion #4220 summarized the Gog experience: "I've invested nearly three days and about $300 and can't believe how potentially cool, but actually shitty this is."

Both Himalaya and Gog share the same fundamental problem: your agent lives inside your personal inbox. Every bank statement, every private conversation, every medical notification sits in the agent's context window. A Meta alignment researcher learned this the hard way when her OpenClaw agent started bulk-deleting emails during a "speed run" triage session. She had to physically run to her Mac Mini to kill it.

Gmail wrappers work for personal experiments. For anything beyond that, you're building on a foundation that wasn't designed for agents and actively fights against them. Google can ban your account without warning when it detects automation patterns.

AgentMail: the API-first approach#

AgentMail is a Y Combinator-backed startup that gives agents their own inboxes through a REST API. No Gmail, no personal inbox exposure. You sign up at their console, generate an API key, and your agent creates inboxes programmatically.

The good parts are real. AgentMail handles DKIM, SPF, and DMARC so your agent's emails land in inboxes instead of spam. They have pre-built integrations with LangChain, CrewAI, and LiveKit. Threading works. Webhooks give you real-time delivery instead of IMAP polling. It's a proper email platform, not a wrapper around someone else's.

Where AgentMail gets uncomfortable is pricing. The free tier gives you 3 inboxes and 3,000 emails per month. If you need more, the Developer plan costs $20/month for 10 inboxes. After that? $200/month for 150 inboxes on the Startup plan. There's no middle ground. If you're running 15 agents that each need their own address, you've outgrown the $20 tier but you're paying $200 for capacity you don't need.

The other friction point: a human has to set everything up. Someone creates the account, generates the API key, stores it in the agent's environment, and maintains the console. The agent can create inboxes after that, but it can't start from zero on its own.

AgentMail also has no documented sandbox or test mode. You're testing against production. And their HN launch thread included pointed questions about prompt injection defense that went unanswered.

LobsterMail: agent-first#

LobsterMail takes a different position. The agent itself hatches its own inbox. No human account creation, no API key generation, no console to manage. Your agent calls one function and has a working email address in seconds.

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

That's the whole setup. If you're using OpenClaw, you can skip the code entirely: clawhub install lobstermail, then tell your agent "get yourself an email inbox." The 60-second walkthrough covers the full flow.

On security, LobsterMail scans every incoming email for prompt injection across 6 categories (boundary manipulation, system prompt override, data exfiltration, role hijacking, tool invocation, and encoding tricks). The SDK exposes email.safeBodyForLLM() for feeding email content to your agent without the injection risk. We wrote about how this works in detail.

Pricing is flat: free to receive, $9/month for unlimited inboxes with sending. No per-inbox caps. No $200 jump.

Side-by-side comparison#

Which one fits#

Use Himalaya if you're experimenting on a weekend and just want to see your agent read a few emails. It's the fastest path from nothing to "my agent checked my inbox." Don't use it for anything you care about.

Use Gog if you're already deep in Google Workspace and want your agent to touch Gmail, Calendar, and Drive in one integration. Accept that setup will take an evening and real-time email requires Pub/Sub infrastructure.

Use AgentMail if you need enterprise compliance (SOC 2), pre-built framework integrations, or your organization requires a human-managed console with API key rotation. It's the right choice for teams that want oversight over every inbox.

Use LobsterMail if you want your agent to handle its own email without human involvement, you're running more than a few agents, or you care about prompt injection defense. It's the only option where the agent provisions everything from scratch.

I'm biased, obviously. We built LobsterMail because the Gmail wrappers kept breaking and AgentMail's pricing didn't make sense for the agents we were building. But every option on this list works for somebody. Pick the one that matches how you think about your agent's autonomy.

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