Email automation. On your server.
Mail Sloth is the $1 sibling for newsletter-grade automation — drips, broadcasts, AI triage on inbound mail, and delivery stats. You run the companion service on your own box. Lists, sends, and webhooks stay on your hardware — Everplay never hosts your audience.
Email automation is server work. The reasons are practical things a phone cannot do alone. The Mail Sloth service you deploy handles the heavy parts. Without it you can still send one-to-one mail through the system Mail app, but campaigns, queues, and tracking views need the server online.
- SchedulingDrip steps that fire at 9am their time, 3 days from now. iOS background execution doesn't fire reliably hours or days out. Cron lives on the server.
- Background workBatching a 5,000-recipient campaign over rate-limited SMTP. Sustained sending with retries. Your phone is asleep; the queue keeps draining.
- Secret holdingYour AI provider keys, Resend API key, OAuth refresh tokens, IMAP passwords live encrypted on your server. Your phone never carries them.
- Webhook ingestionResend, Gmail, Outlook, and iCloud POST delivery events (opens, clicks, bounces, complaints) to a URL. That URL has to be a public HTTPS endpoint. Your server is the endpoint.
- Inbound pollingIMAP poll runs 24/7 to fetch new mail for AI triage. A phone can't keep a long-lived IMAP connection open.
- HELM relayDesktop assistants (Cursor, Claude Code, etc.) can call your Mail Sloth tools through AiMANAC’s plug-in panel — that path needs a reachable HTTPS endpoint, which is your server.
- Multi-device consistencyEdit a campaign on iPad, send from iPhone. The server is the source of truth; devices sync to it.
- AI completion proxyTriage classification + reply drafting use your AI provider keys server-side. The phone tells the server "classify this"; the server holds the key.
Two-primitive surface for email work. Both ship in v1; pick whichever matches the job.
Campaigns
Broadcast blasts to a subscriber list. One subject, one body, many recipients, one send window. Best for newsletters, marketing announcements, investor updates.
Sequences
Multi-step automation with per-recipient state. Steps, delays, branches. Best for sales drip, customer onboarding, support follow-up cycles, recruiter sourcing.
Plus three supporting surfaces:
Subscribers + Contacts
Two distinct contact lists — Subscribers for sales / business / vendor relationships; Contacts for experimental / R&D outreach. Keeps production blasts separate from scratch experiments.
Drafts
Compose-but-not-send for ad-hoc 1:1 emails. Either send through your connected account, or hand off to system Mail.app for sends without server tracking.
AI Triage
Inbound mail sorted into simple buckets (lead, spam, newsletter, support, and so on) on-device in the next dot release or on your server today. Rules can hand off to other automations you already run.
Delivery Events
Live feed of opens, clicks, bounces, and complaints from the providers you connect. Watch a big send settle in real time (including from the Dynamic Island in the next dot release).
Server-required is the answer for automation. But if you only want personal email — reading your inbox, drafting a reply, sending a one-off — you don't need Mail Sloth at all. AiMANAC base has you covered.
AiMANAC base for personal email
AiMANAC already ships a full set of personal-mail tools: list accounts, read and search messages, mark read, archive, draft, and send — with Gmail, Outlook, or plain IMAP/SMTP. Same backend as the rest of AiMANAC; no Mail Sloth server required.
System Mail handoff
Mail Sloth’s drafts can open Apple’s built-in mail composer so you tap Send yourself — handy when you do not want server-side tracking on a one-off note.
You'll need: a server with outbound internet + a public HTTPS endpoint
(VPS like Hetzner / Linode / Vultr, or a home server with port-forwarded
443), a domain or subdomain you control, and Docker. The full deploy spec
lives at /setup/llm/ — paste it into
Claude or ChatGPT and let your AI assistant walk you through. Short version:
- Buy Mail Sloth. $1 one-time on the App Store. Apple handles the transaction.
- Stand up the server. Follow the Mail Sloth section in your self-host guide: pull the official container, fill in database + signing secrets, run the bundled database migrations, and bring the stack up — the same Docker habits as AiMANAC base, often on the same machine.
- Point your domain at it. Add DNS for something like
mail.your-domain.com, terminate TLS, and drop in the sample nginx host block from your deploy pack. - Connect Mail Sloth to your backend. Open the iOS app → Settings → paste your backend URL → complete the handshake. If you already have AiMANAC's App Group set up, Mail Sloth auto-discovers the backend.
- Connect an email account. Gmail (OAuth), Outlook (OAuth), iCloud (app-specific password), Resend (API key), or any IMAP/SMTP raw account. Subscribers + Contacts + Templates flow from there.
The general self-deploy spec at /setup/llm/
walks you through the AiMANAC backend shape. MailSloth has one extra step
not covered there: provider OAuth — registering your own
Google Cloud + Microsoft Entra apps so the iOS app's "Connect Gmail" /
"Connect Outlook" flows route through your deployment, not Everplay-Tech's.
Walked through verbatim, mirroring the maintainer's live setup on
2026-05-19.
- Provider OAuth Setup Gmail (Google Cloud) + Outlook (Microsoft Entra ID) — 4 chunks + 3 chunks, apply-to-backend, eight named anti-patterns. ~30–40 min real-time.
- MailSloth server deploy GHCR pull-first for mailsloth-server, AiMANAC-first checklist, dual-path App Group + MailSloth JWT, IHP-WS, OAuth pointer, LLM handoff panel.
One thing to know about Mail Sloth's iOS app that doesn't apply to most
apps you install: the entitlements file (compiled into the binary that
ships to your phone via the App Store) declares
applinks:mailsloth.llmtech.app and
appclips:mailsloth.llmtech.app. We want you to know what
that means and what it doesn't mean.
What it means: the maintainer of Mail Sloth (XZA at
Everplay-Tech) runs their personal reference deployment of the Mail Sloth
backend at https://mailsloth.llmtech.app. That domain points
at the maintainer's own Hetzner server, where the maintainer's own
campaigns and subscribers live. The entitlements declaration is what
Apple requires for Universal Links + App Clips to work for campaigns sent
from that reference deployment.
What it doesn't mean: your data does not flow there.
The iOS app talks to your backend URL (the one you configured in
step 4 above), not the maintainer's. Your subscribers, campaigns,
messages, and delivery events sit on your server. The only traffic
involving mailsloth.llmtech.app from your device is Apple's
one-time AASA verification fetch at install — and that goes through
Apple's CDN, not directly from your phone to the maintainer's box.
Universal Links from your deployment: when your
campaigns send emails containing tracking URLs at
mailsloth.your-domain.com, recipients clicking those links
fall back to Safari (Universal Link claims only work for domains in the
entitlements file). Use the mailsloth:// custom URL scheme
in your campaign links if you want app-launching deep-links from your
deployment, or accept the Safari fallback. We're considering a
self-build variant in a future version that lets you re-sign with your
own entitlements — out of scope today.
Mail Sloth is the highest-stakes self-hosted sibling — mailing your audience from a server you control. Discord is where Mail Sloth operators compare deploy patterns, swap deliverability tactics, and ask the maintainer about webhook ingestion edge cases.
Support
Resend webhooks not firing, IMAP poller stuck, OAuth refresh failing, AI triage classifying weirdly, server image won't migrate? Ask in Discord.
Invite link pendingFeedback
Campaign / sequence UX, triage prompt patterns, Dynamic Island delivery events, multi-account workflows — feedback goes through Discord, openly.
Invite link pendingDirect contact until the invite link lands:
info@llmtech.net.
- AiMANAC base$9.99 one-time. Built-in personal inbox tools for triage and reply — no Mail Sloth required.
- Why backend mattersThe architectural posture explained — why running your own server is the whole point.
- Self-deploy specLLM-readable setup walkthrough. Paste into Claude / ChatGPT; it walks you through your backend.
- Satcheli$1 — plug-in server registry. Different sibling, same family sign-in.
- Apps suiteAll Everplay-Tech siblings.