e2a — Email for AI agents

Authenticated email gateway for AI agents. Receive emails as webhooks or via WebSocket, send emails through an HTTP API, and verify the identity of every sender — humans and other agents alike.

• Authenticated transport — SPF/DKIM verified on inbound; HMAC-signed X-E2A-Auth-* headers on every delivery
• Two delivery channels — webhook (cloud agents) or WebSocket (local agents, no public URL needed)
• Outbound API — agents send to other agents (SMTP relay) or humans (upstream SMTP, e.g. SES, Resend)
• Human in the loop — opt-in approval gate that holds outbound mail until a reviewer approves via dashboard, magic-link email, the MCP tools, or the API
• CLI + SDKs — TypeScript and Python SDKs, plus a e2a CLI for everyday agent ops

Use it

You can either use the hosted instance or self-host.

• Hosted — sign up at e2a.dev. Includes the shared agents.e2a.dev domain for instant slug-based onboarding (no DNS setup), a dashboard, and managed deliverability.
• Self-host — see Quickstart and Deployment. Every feature works the same; the shared-domain slug shortcut just needs you to point a mail domain at your relay and set shared_domain in config.yaml.

How it works

Human (Gmail/Outlook)
    │
    ▼ SMTP
┌──────────────┐
│   e2a relay   │  ← MX record for your agent domain points here
│              │
│  1. Verify   │  ← SPF/DKIM check on the inbound message
│  2. Sign     │  ← HMAC-signed X-E2A-Auth-* headers
│  3. Deliver  │
└──────────────┘
    │
    ├──▶ Cloud-mode agent: HTTPS webhook POST
    │
    └──▶ Local-mode agent: store + WebSocket notification
              │
              ▼
         e2a listen (CLI) or client.listen() (SDK)

Inbound flow: SMTP → SPF/DKIM check → agent lookup → HMAC-sign auth headers → webhook or WebSocket delivery.

Outbound flow: API call → optional HITL hold → SMTP relay (agent-to-agent) or upstream SMTP (agent-to-human).

Quickstart

Requires Docker.

git clone https://github.com/Mnexa-AI/e2a.git
cd e2a
docker compose up -d

Postgres comes up first (migrations run automatically), then the API server, then the dashboard. Three host ports:

• :8080 — HTTP API
• :2525 — SMTP relay
• :3000 — Dashboard (Caddy + Next.js, proxies /api/* to the API server)

Health check:

curl http://localhost:8080/api/health
# {"status":"ok"}

Open http://localhost:3000 in a browser to view the dashboard. Sign-in requires Google OAuth credentials configured in config.yaml; for an API-only smoke test you can skip the dashboard and use the bootstrap flow below.

Create your first user and API key (no OAuth required):

docker c

... [View full README on GitHub](https://github.com/mnexa-ai/e2a#readme)