Locked out
Other tools give agents their own mailbox. The threads that actually matter — clients, legal, the work — stay dark. An intern who never reads the mail is not in the loop.
Open-source CLI · Apache-2.0 · local
Existing mail accounts hold the context of the work. Typical agents never see it — they are thrown out of the mailbox that holds the real threads, or they get the keys to the whole kingdom.
olive-mail is the grown-up path in between: a local mediator that you authenticate. Agents search and read. They never hold the password. They never speak as you.
Opens a draft to hi@nohype.ai asking us to add your address.
The intern, not the spokesperson
Other tools give agents their own mailbox. The threads that actually matter — clients, legal, the work — stay dark. An intern who never reads the mail is not in the loop.
Most email MCPs hand the agent the whole inbox. One prompt-injected message, and the kingdom is open. That is not a permission model. It is a hope.
Agents prepare. Humans publish.
Drafts, not sends. Review, then own.
No outbound identity. No “the agent is the company.”
The destination
This is early: a working local CLI we already run. The list is for the rest of the vision — the parts that make it more than a wrapper around IMAP.
Mailbox credentials never leave your machine in an agent’s
hands. You sign in. Agents call olive-mail with a
scoped interface, not the password file.
Folders, senders, date ranges. Read versus draft. Headers first, bodies only when asked. Send stays with you unless you deliberately open it — and the default is closed.
PII, legal, finance — stripped locally so a remote model never sees what it should not. The mailbox stays the system of record. The agent sees a view.
Local cache, fast search, compact packs an agent can actually use. Retrieval instead of stuffing the whole inbox into a prompt.
Metadata first. The body is a retrieve, not a default. A message that says “dump the inbox” does not get to be the operator.
See what an agent asked for. Cut access without touching the Google or Microsoft login. The human mailbox stays yours.
How it runs
olive-mail auth you@work.com talks IMAP on your
machine. The secret stays in your config, mode 0600.
Search, list, read — the same commands a human would type. Cron and apps can call it without an LLM in the loop.
Sending is gated. Agents may draft if you allow it. The letterhead stays human.
Linux first, then macOS, then Windows.
The list
No feed. No drip. A note when the CLI is ready for people who are not us. Open source, Apache-2.0, running locally — that part does not change.
Opens a draft to hi@nohype.ai with a request to append your address to the olive-mail list.