Let people email your agent
Give your agent an email address: each new email starts or continues a session, and your agent replies by email.
On this page
You can give your agent an email address. When someone you allow emails it, a session starts (or an earlier one continues), the agent does the work, and it emails its reply back. You do this with your own inbox at AgentMail, an outside email service.
Use your own AgentMail inbox#
If you already have an inbox at AgentMail, Yardmaster can check it every 30 seconds while the app is open.
Store your AgentMail key on this computer (see below). Yardmaster has no box to type it into.
Open Settings > Email & Summaries and expand the card that starts with Advanced ("use your own email inbox").
Turn on Email Inbound and paste your address into Inbox ID.
Click Test. Connected successfully means the key and the inbox both work.
Add the people allowed to email it under Approved Senders.
In Terminal, run this, then paste your key when it asks for a password (twice). Typing the key this way keeps it out of Terminal's history.
security add-generic-password -s AgentMail -a api-key -wAdd a user environment variable named AGENTMAIL_API_KEY holding your key, then restart Yardmaster.
With Approved Senders empty, anyone who learns the address can start a session. For more safety, click Generate next to Inbox Secret Token: then an email only gets through if its subject also contains [MC: and the token.
Safety check. Before your agent sees an email from your own inbox, a small AI model reads a shortened copy (contact details removed) and holds anything that looks like an attempt to misuse your agent. Prescreen Rules holds the instructions it follows.
Limits. At most 10 email sessions run at once, and at most 100 new conversations start per hour.
The key. The key never goes into Yardmaster's settings file: it stays in the Mac Keychain or your environment. The same inbox can also feed Email Summarizer.
Approved Senders checks the sender's address, which can be faked. Treat it as a filter, not a lock.