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Why Not Let OpenClaw Write the Email Tool?

Zeno Rocha refused to let OpenClaw write the email command line because giving it an open API spec would generate a badly written command line, and he hated that outcome.

Internal command line tools had already shown up in hackathons, yet he had long felt that nobody would open a terminal just to send a transactional email, a password reset, a welcome email, or a usage email. Configuring a domain and reading logs turned out to be the jobs worth doing from the terminal. While he was spinning up OpenClaw instances for the team and for his own use, handing over the open API spec was not an option, so the team built the command line itself. They chose TypeScript so it could be open source. They debated Go, then picked what was better for open source contribution rather than deployment, build, or performance. Shipping the tool took a long time, and shipping the MCP server took a long time too.

After the MCP server was public, clients required an authentication method by default. The team went back through the whole authentication layer, including how every request is saved, so a request could be authenticated in more than one way and not only with an API key.

Grokipedia·OpenClaw·TypeScript

Transcript

Building what's next (Interview) ·

The Changelog: Software Dev & Open Source

More from this episode

  1. How Did Resend Take Its First Payments?Zeno Rocha took Resend's first payments with a Stripe payment link in January 2023.
  2. How Can a Mail Record Silently Stop Company Email?Zeno Rocha says receiving email is tricky because an MX record can compete with Google Workspace on priority. Setup starts by adding an MX record.
  3. What Email Feature Was Requested Most for a Year?Zeno Rocha built the first version of inbound email by feeling the pain himself, after it stayed the number one most requested feature for over a year.
  4. How Does TripSee Capture a Booking Email?Zeno Rocha says one company they help, TripSee, lets a user forward a flight or hotel booking email to a special address.
  5. What Kind of Company Is Resend?Zeno Rocha says Resend is a utility company. The team started out thinking they were building a developer tools company.
  6. Why Do Agents Auto-retry Standard Rate Limits?Zeno Rocha says agents know how to auto-retry when a service follows the rate-limiting RFC.
  7. Why Won't Resend Outsource Its Keys?Zeno Rocha considered WorkOS and skipped it because the team has to own that part.
  8. How Does Zeno Rocha Hire for Email?Zeno Rocha is hiring through heavy noise from fake resumes and other weird things, trying to assemble the Avengers of the email industry.

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