Give Your AI Agent Its Own Inbox: A 5-Minute Setup with MCP

EngageLab has released an official Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that gives AI agents a two-way email inbox, enabling them to send and receive messages with full thread context. The setup, which takes about five minutes, provides agents with nine tools including send, reply, list inbound mail, and browse threads, and supports sandbox mode for testing without real delivery.

Most email APIs are send-only. But if you're building an agent that needs to have a conversation over email — support, scheduling, invoicing — it needs to receive replies too, with thread context. In this post we'll set up an agent with its own mailbox using the Model Context Protocol. This is an official EngageLab Email tutorial, so feedback from developers is welcome. Create an EngageLab account https://www.engagelab.com/zh CN/accounts/signup and generate a Secret Key from the console it looks like sk sg xxx — the prefix encodes the region . Or use the CLI to create one via browser login: npm install -g @engagelabemail/cli engagelab-email-cli login You'll also need a mailbox — create one in the console shared subdomain is fastest to start; custom domains need DNS verification . For Claude Code: claude mcp add engagelab-email \ -e ENGAGELAB EMAIL SECRET KEY=sk sg yourkey \ -- npx -y @engagelabemail/mcp Or in claude desktop config.json : { "mcpServers": { "engagelab-email": { "command": "npx", "args": "-y", "@engagelabemail/mcp" , "env": { "ENGAGELAB EMAIL SECRET KEY": "sk sg yourkey" } } } } Ask your agent: List my mailboxes, then send an email from the first one to me@example.com saying "invoice 42 approved", then check for new messages. The agent now has 9 tools: send, reply, list inbound mail, get a message, poll for new mail, and browse threads. sandbox: true in send email skips real delivery while you're iterating on promptsRepo: https://github.com/Metaverse-Cloud/engagelab-email-mcp https://github.com/Metaverse-Cloud/engagelab-email-mcp Package: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@engagelabemail/mcp https://www.npmjs.com/package/@engagelabemail/mcp What would you build first — a support agent, or an approval bot?