Meta began rolling out email addresses for its Muse AI agent on Nov. 10, letting paid subscribers in the US and Canada bring the agent into their correspondence. "Add it to a thread or forward it an email, and it'll handle the replies and follow-ups for you," Vishal Shah, Meta's vice president of AI products, said, according to The Verge.
The rollout is the latest sign that AI agents are being set up as correspondents with addresses of their own, rather than as tools that borrow a person's inbox. Microsoft and a group of startups have shipped similar setups in recent weeks.
Meta's version
Meta AI chief Alexandr Wang announced the feature at the company's Connect event in September, The Verge reported. Before that event, RuntimeWire inspected a Muse 2.2 Mac installer and found a flag-gated flow for creating an agent-owned address ending in @muse.ai, with mailbox views for received and sent mail. RuntimeWire said it did not test a live account.
A setup guide published Nov. 7 by All Things Muse explains the difference users run into. Gmail and Outlook connectors link Muse to a mailbox a person already owns, while Muse Mail gives the agent its own address that other people can write to directly. The guide says the rollout is staged and that Meta has not confirmed the address format or given a timeline.
Microsoft's version
Microsoft took a corporate route on Oct. 15, when it added agent accounts to Copilot Studio. According to Microsoft's documentation, an agent with an account gets its own Microsoft Entra ID identity along with a mailbox in Microsoft 365. People can assign it work in Teams and Outlook.
Jason Moore, vice president of product for Copilot Studio, wrote that the agent uses its own approved credentials and scoped permissions instead of borrowing a person's. That lets process owners see which actions an agent took and which a person took, he wrote. The feature requires specific licensing, including a Microsoft 365 Frontier for AI Teammates license for the agent account, the documentation says.
Startups selling the plumbing
Inkbox, a company from Y Combinator's Summer 2026 batch, announced a $5.3 million seed round led by Peak XV on Nov. 9. Inkbox already gave agents their own email, phone numbers, iMessage and WhatsApp, co-founder Ray Liao wrote in a company post. Its new hosted agents run on a cloud computer that wakes when a message arrives and sleeps when idle.
Liao framed the problem as one of timing. "Any agent can send an email with one API call," he wrote. "But replies don't arrive on your schedule."
Without hosting, Liao argued, developers either keep an agent running around the clock or build their own servers and wake-up logic. Crypto Briefing reported that Inkbox reached $300,000 in annual recurring revenue by September. The All Things Muse guide also points to third-party agent inbox services, including AgentMail, that sell addresses people can connect to agents today.
Addresses as a control
The vendors pitch a separate address partly as a way to limit what an agent can touch. Inkbox says an agent's access is scoped to its own identity, so it can act as itself without acting as the rest of a workspace. Owners decide who can reach each agent and which events wake it, the company says.
Microsoft says administrators can scope an agent account's access and manage its lifecycle, and that more controls covering access and cost are planned in the coming months. RuntimeWire noted in September that the controls on mail sent to a Muse address had not been tested.
Source: The Verge, “Meta's Muse can now deal with a forwarded email”
Additional sources: RuntimeWire, “Ahead of Meta Connect, Muse's Mac app shows an email address for your AI assistant”; All Things Muse, “How to Set Up Your Muse Email”; Microsoft, “Delegate shared business processes to agents with Microsoft Copilot Studio”; Microsoft Learn, “Agent accounts in Copilot Studio”; Inkbox, “Inkbox raises a $5.3M seed and launches hosted agents”; Crypto Briefing, “Inkbox raises $5.3 million and launches cloud-hosted AI agents”
