I spent a few hours tonight giving my AI assistant an email address.
Not so it could write emails for me. Not to pipe newsletters through Claude and get summaries. I gave it an email address so that when something sends it a message, it actually receives the message, wakes up, and does something about it.
Small thing. Changed more than I expected.
The assistant is Andy — a NanoClaw instance I’ve been running locally. NanoClaw is a self-hosted agent runtime that lives in a Docker container, connects to WhatsApp or Telegram, and responds when you talk to it. I’ve been using it as a project manager of sorts: it watches my Paperclip board, wakes up coding agents when there’s work to do, and keeps track of what’s going on across projects.
It’s good at this. But it has a blind spot: it only knows what I tell it. It has no inbox of its own.
The fix was three pieces.
Fastmail. I created a custom inbox folder and set up a routing rule so anything sent to andy@[my-domain].com lands there. Andy reads it via JMAP — Fastmail’s proper API, not IMAP over a cursed socket.
Resend. I set Andy up with a Resend inbound address. Anything sent there hits Resend’s receiving API. Andy polls GET /emails/receiving and pulls the full message: subject, body, headers, raw. No webhook needed for reading. For real-time delivery, Resend fires an email.received webhook.
A relay. NanoClaw’s webhook endpoint expects a plain message string. Resend’s webhook sends its own schema. So I wrote a forty-line Cloudflare Worker that sits between them: receives Resend’s payload, extracts the email ID, from, and subject, reformats it as a prompt, and POSTs it to NanoClaw. The agent wakes up, fetches the full email, and acts on it.
One evening. Most of it was the relay.
Here’s the thing.
If a service needs to reach Andy now — to tell it a deploy finished, that a Stripe webhook fired, that a customer replied — it can. It has an address. It’s reachable.
Most agents are reactive. You prompt them, they respond, they go to sleep. An agent with an inbox is different. Things can happen to it. It’s not waiting for you to remember to ask — it’s a participant in the infrastructure.
I tested it tonight. Sent an email to Andy’s inbound address. Thirty seconds later Andy was reading it in Telegram and telling me what it said.
No magic. Just plumbing.
The thing that keeps getting me about this work is how little of it is “AI.” The Claude parts — the reasoning, the judgment, the natural language — those are almost the easy part now. The hard part is the same as it always was: APIs, webhooks, routing rules, authentication, format mismatches. Connecting systems together.
Giving Andy an email address didn’t require any new model capabilities. It required a Fastmail rule, a Resend account, and a Cloudflare Worker. But once you do that plumbing, the AI part starts to feel more real. Less like a chat window. More like a colleague.
One who lives in a container and has never had to deal with seven thousand unread emails.