Mailgent vs a shared inbox
Pointing an agent at a shared team inbox seems easy until you hit attribution, scoping, and 2FA. Here's why a per-agent identity beats a shared mailbox.
A quick way to give an agent email is to hand it credentials to a shared team inbox — support@, hello@, ops@. It works in a demo. In production it creates problems that compound as you add agents.
Mailgent's model is one identity per agent: a distinct address, a scoped key, and an audit trail. That's what keeps a fleet of agents safe, attributable, and controllable.
The problems with sharing
Attribution disappears: when several agents and humans act from one mailbox, you can't tell who did what. Scoping is all-or-nothing: the agent gets full mailbox access or none. Security is fragile: the agent holds human login credentials, often including the 2FA secret, with no way to limit blast radius.
Add a second agent and it gets worse — they step on each other's threads and labels, and a mistake by one taints the shared space.
Per-agent identity instead
With Mailgent, each agent has its own address and its own scoped key. You grant exactly the capabilities it needs — read-only triage, send, calendar — and revoke them independently. Every action is logged under that agent's identity.
Need a human in the loop? The agent forwards or labels a thread for your team without sharing a mailbox or credentials.
Scaling to many agents
Because identities are cheap to provision and isolated by design, running ten or a hundred agents is just more identities — not a more crowded shared inbox. Limits and audit logs make the fleet manageable.
FAQ
Can't I just use filters in a shared inbox?
Filters don't fix attribution or scoping. A misbehaving agent still has full access and its actions are indistinguishable from others'.
How does a human stay involved?
Agents forward or label threads for your team, so humans step in without sharing credentials or a mailbox.
Is per-agent identity expensive?
No. Identities are cheap to provision; plans include several and scale up affordably.
Give your agent an inbox.
A real email address, a vault, 2FA, and an identity in one API call.