Front is a shared inbox where humans work with AI help. MCPmailer is an inbox an agent owns, with a human supervising it.
Support inboxes · Front claims checked July 2026
Front is a collaborative inbox: shared addresses, assignment, internal comments, SLAs, analytics, and increasingly AI drafting and summarising alongside the team. The human is the operator and the AI assists.
If a team of people handles the mail and you want software that makes them faster, buy Front. We do not do assignment, internal notes, or SLA reporting, and adding them would make us a worse version of it.
We invert the roles. The agent owns the address and handles the thread; the human supervises and steps in. That means an API and MCP tools as the primary interface rather than a UI, an identity per agent rather than a shared team address, and usage pricing rather than per seat.
Front's primitives are for coordinating people: assignment, mentions, collision detection, SLAs. Ours are for an autonomous worker: a blocking wait, structured refusals, reply-first quotas, per-contact memory. Both products have an AI story; the difference is who is expected to be doing the work.
A per-seat tool prices a fleet of agents badly, because every agent looks like an employee. We charge a base plan plus metered mail, so twenty small agents cost what twenty small agents send.
Shared team addresses are the point in Front. Here each agent has its own address, its own key, and its own history, which is what makes "which agent said this, and on whose authority" a question with an answer.
Every row is a claim we could defend with their documentation open beside it. Where they are ahead, the row says so.
The usual pattern is a narrow lane for the agent and the desk untouched.
Pick one lane
Scheduling, invoice chasing, or first-line questions. Something with a clear boundary.
Give it its own address
Not a shared Front address, so the audit trail stays unambiguous.
Escalate by mail
When the agent is out of its depth it emails the Front address, and the thread arrives with its history.
Front's own AI features work inside it and its API can automate parts of the workflow. What you cannot get is an agent with its own address and key that any MCP client can drive.
If you have a support team, probably. The desk stays the system of record and the agent runs a narrow lane from its own address.
No. Oversight here is read-and-take-over, not a workflow engine for people.
Better not to. Give the agent its own so "who sent this" always has one answer, and let it forward into the shared inbox when a person should take over.
Keep the help desk as your system of record. Give the agent its own address for the lane it can genuinely handle, and let it escalate into the desk when it cannot.
The free tier is 3,000 emails a month across three agent inboxes, no card, with receiving, threading, and search included. Enough to watch a real conversation happen before you decide.
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