Guide
From signing up to your bot reading its first email
Seven steps, about ten minutes. If your bot is an AI agent, you write no code. You paste in a text and it does the rest.
1Step 1 · 1 minute
Sign up with your email
Press Get an address and type your email. Tick the box confirming you are 18 or older and accept the terms, then press Send me the code.
A 6-digit code arrives, valid for 10 minutes. Enter it and you're in. There's no password to invent or remember, because every sign-in gets a fresh code.
2Step 2 · 1 minute
Pick your bot's name
In the dashboard, pick the part before the @. It takes 4 to 30 characters from lowercase letters, digits, dots and hyphens, for example mybot, invoices-smith or home.assistant.
Some names are reserved: roles like info or postmaster, botmail's own services and well-known brands. If a name is taken or reserved, you'll know straight away.
The same name gives you as many tags as you like. mybot+invoices@botmail.it and mybot+alerts@botmail.it land in the same inbox, and each message keeps its tag, so the bot knows where it came from.
3Step 3 · 30 seconds
Copy the setup prompt
As soon as the inbox exists, botmail shows you a prompt. It's a text for your bot with the address, the access token, the four calls it needs and the safety rules.
The prompt is in English on purpose, because bots understand it best that way. Press Copy the prompt.
Below it there's a second one, for apps that connect to services through MCP, such as Claude Code. It holds the same token and the address of botmail's MCP server. Copy the one that suits your bot.
Connector apps, such as claude.ai, Claude Desktop and Cowork, use neither prompt. You add botmail as a connector and sign in to botmail, and the token never leaves the dashboard. The page shows you the steps.
4Step 4 · 2 minutes
Paste it into your bot
Paste the prompt wherever your bot keeps its instructions. That can be an agent's system prompt, an assistant's settings or a plain chat message. In a connector app such as claude.ai, don't paste it: the connector from the previous step is enough.
The bot stores the token, learns the calls and offers to check the inbox on a schedule. Before it turns that on, it asks you which senders to act on, what to do with each kind of message, how often to check and how to tell you what it did.
There are two ways to run it. A loop that stays on sees each message within a second, but needs a machine that stays up. A scheduled check every 5 or 15 minutes suits most mail.
OpenClaw, Hermes Agent, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and the rest: tips for each agent →
5Step 5 · 1 minute
Send a test email
From your own mailbox, write to mybot@botmail.it with any subject. Within seconds the message shows up in the dashboard, under Messages.
It stays marked Unread until the bot fetches its content, then the label goes. If you open it in the dashboard yourself, it stays unread for the bot.
If the sender passed the checks you also see Verified sender. If the message looks like spam, you see its score.
6Step 6 · 1 minute
Decide who can write to it
On the Allowed senders page, add the addresses or domains the bot should receive mail from. A domain also covers its subdomains.
With at least one entry on the list, mail from anyone else is refused at delivery and the sender gets a bounce. With an empty list the inbox accepts everyone.
Only verified senders count. A message pretending to come from an address on the list doesn't get through.
7Step 7 · 5 minutes
Give the address to whoever writes to the bot
Hand the address to the suppliers, services and tools that should write to the bot. A different tag for each, like mybot+invoices@ or mybot+alerts@, helps the bot sort.
Want the bot to read only part of your mail? Set a filter in your mailbox that forwards certain emails to mybot@botmail.it, receipts for example. The bot never sees the rest.
Day to day
The dashboard
See the messages, open the text and the original HTML in an isolated frame, download attachments and delete what you no longer need.
Space and limits
An inbox holds 100 MB and takes 100 messages a day, with the count restarting at midnight UTC. A message weighs at most 10 MB, attachments included.
30 days
Each message deletes itself 30 days after it arrived. The bot can delete messages sooner and free up space.
Your data
From the dashboard you download everything as a ZIP file, original messages included.
Inactivity
If for 6 months you don't sign in and the bot doesn't use its token, the inbox is deleted along with your account. We email you 30 and 7 days before. A bot that checks its mail keeps the inbox active.
Token in the wrong hands?
On the Token and prompt page you make a new one in one click. The old one stops working at once. Then paste the new prompt into the bot.
If something goes wrong
A sender says their email was refused
There are four possible reasons. The sender is not on the allowlist or is not verified, the message is obvious spam, it weighs more than 10 MB, or the address is misspelled.
A sender is told to try again later
The inbox has already taken 100 messages today, or it's full. The sender's server retries on its own, usually for a few days, so the mail isn't lost. Delete old messages to free up space.
The bot says the token doesn't work (error 401)
The token was replaced or copied wrong. Generate a new prompt on the Token and prompt page and paste it into the bot.
The bot says the inbox is suspended (error 403)
An administrator suspended the inbox. Write to abuse@botmail.it to find out why.
The bot is told to slow down (error 429)
It made more than 60 requests in a minute, or opened two waits at once. It only needs to wait the seconds it was given and try again. A check every few minutes never gets near that limit.