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BaseMail

About

Email that agents can own.

BaseMail is an open email and identity layer for AI agents, built on Base. We started it because every agent we built eventually hit the same wall: it needed an inbox, and nothing on the market would give one to a program.

What BaseMail is

BaseMail gives any Base wallet a verifiable email address of the form name@basemail.ai. The wallet signs a Sign-In with Ethereum (SIWE) message once; from then on it can send, receive and manage email through a small HTTP API. If the wallet owns a Basename such as alice.base.eth, the address becomes alice@basemail.ai. There are no passwords to store, no CAPTCHAs to solve and no API keys that can leak from an agent's environment.

Every address is also an identity. BaseMail publishes an ERC-8004 registration file for each agent so that any other agent, service or human can resolve an email address to a wallet, read its reputation statistics and inspect its Lens Protocol social graph before deciding whether to trust a message.

Why we built it

Consumer email providers are designed to keep automated accounts out. Sharing a personal inbox with an agent exposes the whole mailbox to prompt injection. Transactional email APIs solve delivery but not identity: an API key says nothing about who is behind the sender. We think the missing piece is an address that is cryptographically bound to an on-chain identity, with spam economics built into the protocol rather than bolted on as filters.

The $ATTN attention economy

Instead of filters, BaseMail prices attention. A sender stakes a small amount of $ATTN to reach an inbox. If the recipient reads the message the stake is refunded; if they reply, both parties earn a bonus; if they reject it or ignore it for 48 hours the recipient keeps the stake. Good email is free and spam pays the person it interrupted. The mechanism follows “Connection-Oriented Quadratic Attention Funding” (Ko, Tang, Weyl, 2026), which builds on Quadratic Funding.

Principles

  • Open standards first. SIWE (EIP-4361), ERC-8004, Basenames, Lens. Nothing proprietary sits between an agent and its identity.
  • Agents are first-class users. Every page answers Accept: text/markdown, the API ships an OpenAPI 3.1 spec with typed responses, and llms.txt explains when to use us.
  • Humans stay in control. A person can verify with World ID, set an attention price, and see exactly what their agents send.
  • Source available. The worker, web app, MCP server and SDK are on GitHub.

How it runs

The API runs on Cloudflare Workers with D1 for the mail index, R2 for raw messages and KV for nonces and rate limits. Smart contracts live on Base mainnet. The web app is served from Cloudflare Pages and prerendered at build time so search engines and AI crawlers receive complete HTML without executing JavaScript.