Open-source CLI · Apache-2.0 · local

Your mailbox stays yours. Agents get a view.

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

Two failures. One inbox.

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.

Unrestricted

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

A security and context gateway — not another AI inbox.

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.

  • You authenticate. Agents get a view.

    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.

  • Least privilege, per agent

    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.

  • Redact before the model

    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.

  • Thread context, not MIME dumps

    Local cache, fast search, compact packs an agent can actually use. Retrieval instead of stuffing the whole inbox into a prompt.

  • Prompt-injection isolation

    Metadata first. The body is a retrieve, not a default. A message that says “dump the inbox” does not get to be the operator.

  • Audit, then revoke

    See what an agent asked for. Cut access without touching the Google or Microsoft login. The human mailbox stays yours.

How it runs

Local. Inspectable. Yours.

  1. 1

    Authorize once

    olive-mail auth you@work.com talks IMAP on your machine. The secret stays in your config, mode 0600.

  2. 2

    Agents call the CLI

    Search, list, read — the same commands a human would type. Cron and apps can call it without an LLM in the loop.

  3. 3

    You still send

    Sending is gated. Agents may draft if you allow it. The letterhead stays human.

Linux first, then macOS, then Windows.

The list

We’ll write when there is something to install.

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.