How to Give Your OpenClaw Agent an Email Address

The one thing your agent still can't do

OpenClaw is a capable agent. It can drive a browser, write and run code, and operate a terminal. But the moment a task requires email (confirming a signup, reading a one-time code, replying to a vendor), it stalls. There's no inbox it owns and no clean way to read what arrives. Giving it a real, authenticated mailbox closes that gap, and it takes about two minutes.

Step 1: Create your Robotomail account

Head to robotomail.com and create an account. The signup form is short, four fields, but one of them is doing more work than it looks, so it's worth a walk-through.

• Name
  A human-readable label for the account, your team or project name is fine. It doesn't affect the agent's address.
• Human email
  Your own inbox, used for the verification link, billing receipts, and account notices. This is never the agent's address, keep the two separate.
• Mailbox name
  The important one. Whatever you type here becomes the agent's live address on the shared platform domain, type triage-agent and the agent owns triage-agent@robotomail.co. The field checks availability as you type and turns green when the name is free.
• Password
  Protects the dashboard you'll use to manage keys, domains, and billing. Your agent never needs it, agents authenticate with an API key, not your password.

Submit the form and Robotomail sends a verification link to your human email. Click it to confirm the account, then finish signup by starting your free trial. A fresh account must verify before it can send, which keeps the platform's sender reputation clean for everyone.

Step 2: Start your trial and copy your API key

After you verify your email and start your free trial, you land on the dashboard. The mailbox itself is created at signup; starting the trial is what activates your API key, so the agent can actually send and receive. This is account management only, there's no inbox UI to click through here, because your agent does the reading and writing over the API. The dashboard is where you watch activity, manage mailboxes and domains, and create the API keys your agent authenticates with.

Now grab your API key. Go to Settings → API keys, click Create key, give it a name your future self will recognize (for example openclaw-agent), and Robotomail shows the full key exactly once. It starts with rm_.

Copy that key directly into a secret manager like 1Password, don't leave it in a scratch file and don't paste it into a chat window. If you lose it, you can't recover it; you just create a new one and delete the old. The key is the agent's entire credential, so treat it like a password.

Step 3: Ask OpenClaw to install the skill

Here's the trick: you don't install anything yourself. You just ask your agent. Tell OpenClaw to install the Robotomail skill, then point it at your API key in 1Password, don't paste the secret into the chat. The agent pulls the key, connects, and is ready to send and receive real email.

Install the robotomail skill.

My Robotomail API key is in 1Password under "Robotomail".
Pull it from there. Don't ask me to paste it into the chat.

Pointing the agent at a vault reference instead of a pasted key keeps the secret out of the transcript and logs. The skill exposes a small set of tools (send, list, read, and reply) so the agent has everything it needs and nothing it doesn't. See the full agent skill.

Live demo: watch it work

The agent now owns a mailbox, triage-agent@robotomail.co. From Gmail, send it a verification email, exactly like any signup would. Within seconds OpenClaw receives a clean JSON event: sender, subject, the parsed body, the code, and the thread. No IMAP, no raw MIME.

{
  "event": "message.received",
  "timestamp": "2026-06-01T10:00:00.000Z",
  "data": {
    "message_id": "b2c3d4e5-6789-4abc-def0-222222222222",
    "mailbox_id": "a1b2c3d4-5678-4def-abcd-111111111111",
    "mailbox_address": "triage-agent@robotomail.co",
    "from": "no-reply@acme.com",
    "to": ["triage-agent@robotomail.co"],
    "subject": "Confirm your email",
    "body_text": "Your verification code is 481920. It expires in 10 minutes.",
    "thread_id": "c3d4e5f6-789a-4bcd-ef01-333333333333",
    "received_at": "2026-06-01T10:00:00.000Z"
  }
}

The agent grabs the code straight out of the body, finishes the signup, then forwards the confirmation to you, one POST to the messages endpoint. Robotomail returns the message ID. Inbound to outbound, fully autonomous.

curl -X POST https://api.robotomail.com/v1/mailboxes/mbx_triage/messages \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer rm_your_api_key" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "to": ["you@company.com"],
    "subject": "Signup confirmed ✓",
    "bodyText": "Done. I entered the code and the account is active."
  }'

{
  "message": {
    "id": "b2c3d4e5-6789-4abc-def0-222222222222",
    "direction": "OUTBOUND",
    "toAddresses": ["you@company.com"],
    "status": "SENT",
    "threadId": "c3d4e5f6-789a-4bcd-ef01-333333333333"
  }
}

Going further

Need more? It's all there. Three of the most common next steps:

• Bring your own custom domain
  The platform domain (@robotomail.co) is great for getting started. When you want the agent to send as agent@yourcompany.com, add a custom domain, Robotomail generates the DNS records you need (MX, a send MX, SPF, DMARC, and one or more DKIM records) and verifies them as soon as propagation completes.
• Fire a webhook on every inbound message
  Register a webhook URL and Robotomail POSTs every inbound message to it within seconds of receipt, signed with HMAC-SHA256 so you can verify it before trusting the payload.
• Subscribe to a live event stream
  No public URL to expose? Open a server-sent event (SSE) connection to GET /v1/events and the agent streams inbound events over a single long-lived request, no webhook endpoint required.

curl -X POST https://api.robotomail.com/v1/webhooks \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer rm_your_api_key" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "url": "https://your-server.com/webhook",
    "events": ["message.received"]
  }'

$ npx @robotomail/cli domain verify acme.com
⏳ checking DNS...
✓ MX       propagated
✓ SPF      valid
✓ DKIM     aligned
✓ DMARC    policy ok
✓ acme.com is fully verified.

GET /v1/events?events=message.received
Authorization: Bearer rm_your_api_key
Accept: text/event-stream

# Each inbound message arrives as a standard SSE frame:
id: 1710700000000-0000-a3f1
event: message.received
data: {"event":"message.received","timestamp":"2026-06-01T10:00:00.000Z","data":{"message_id":"b2c3d4e5-...","mailbox_address":"triage-agent@robotomail.co","from":"no-reply@acme.com","subject":"Confirm your email","body_text":"Your verification code is 481920.","received_at":"2026-06-01T10:00:00.000Z"}}

The stream replays missed events on reconnect via Last-Event-ID, see the Events (SSE) API docs for the full frame format and reconnect semantics.

For the full picture (the four agent tools, error handling, and a copy-paste signup-to-send walkthrough) see the longer guide for any AI agent and the dedicated OpenClaw use-case page.

Frequently asked questions