A few years ago I shut down my last startup, ShopAgain. Before we shut it down, I wanted to open source it. I couldn't — it needed several microservices just to run, and everything was welded together for one specific business. That stuck with me longer than I expected. About a year ago, at my day job, I needed to automate a signup flow for testing. The first step was generating a one-time code and verifying it — small thing, until you try to make it work reliably without a person watching an inbox. I looked at the email APIs that already existed, and they all had the same gap: you get the raw email, and you're the one writing the code to dig the part you actually need out of it. So I built the thing I actually wanted: a real email address that software can use, that parses itself. It pulls the OTPs, the links, the data out of every message that lands and hands it to you through an API — no regex, no polling, no mailbox scraping. You can set rules for what happens next too — forward a message, fire a webhook, take alerts from some old system that only knows how to email you and route them straight to Slack. And since AI agents need their own mailboxes now too, the same inbox works for them. This time I built it open source from the first commit, packaged so anyone can run the whole thing themselves with one `docker compose up`. There's also a free hosted version if you'd rather skip the setup. It's live today. Still rough in places — there are probably bugs I haven't found yet, and I'm honestly still not sold on the logo. SMS support is next. What I'd actually love feedback on: what's the most annoying "wait for an email, then go parse it by hand" problem you've ever had to hand-roll yourself? I want to know if I'm missing an obvious use case. - GitHub (self-host): https://github.com/roshansingh/programmableinbox - Try it free: https://programmableinbox.com   submitted by   /u/foofoo2020 [link]   [comments]