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 the way it was written, I couldn't package that cleanly. Everything was welded together for one specific business.
That stuck with me longer than I expected.
About a year ago, at my current job, I needed to automate a signup flow for testing. The first step was generating a one-time code and verifying it — a small thing, until you try to make it run reliably without a person watching an inbox.
I wanted an API-first email inbox with a direct way to retrieve the code my test needed, rather than rebuilding that parsing step in each test suite.
That's the idea Programmable Inbox is built around: an inbox that does the parsing for you.
It extracts email OTPs and makes received messages available through an API. Tests can read message text to find the links they need. Set rules for what happens next — forward a message, fire a webhook, or take alerts from some old legacy system that only knows how to email you and route them straight to Slack. And now that AI agents need their own mailboxes too, the same inbox works for them.
So about a year ago, nights and weekends, I started building it properly — open source from the first commit, packaged so anyone can run it with one docker compose up. If someone finds it useful, I didn't want them stuck depending on my hosted version just to try it.
It's live today. I'm still improving it and fixing bugs — and I'm still not sold on the logo.
But I'd rather ship it than keep polishing it in a drawer.
SMS support is next.
I'd love to know what you'd build with it.