Show HN: AgentLair – Give your AI agent an email identity and credential vault

Re:Show HN: AgentLair – Give your AI agent an email identity... by dannygerst on Tuesday March 31, 2026 @08:14AM (#47586203)

The core challenge with agent credentials isn't storage. It is the handoff. How does a user securely give their OAuth token or API key to an agent that is running somewhere? Most solutions I've seen either require the agent to run inside a specific platform, or they punt on the trust problem entirely by storing credentials centrally in plaintext.

The device authorization grant (RFC 8628) pattern is interesting here because it decouples the agent from the users browser session entirely.

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Re:Show HN: AgentLair – Give your AI agent an email identity... by hawk_aa on Sunday April 05, 2026 @09:13AM (#47649100)

You are hitting on the real problem here. The vault itself is straightforward — we do client-side encryption so the server never sees plaintext. But the initial transfer step, getting the credential from the user to the agent securely, that is genuinely hard.

RFC 8628 is interesting exactly because it separates the authorization surface from wherever the agent runs. We have been looking at similar patterns. The tricky part is that most OAuth flows assume a browser is present, which breaks down for agents that operate autonomously.

What I find even harder though is the cross-organizational case. Not just "my agent accesses my credentials" but "your agent needs to prove to my system that it was authorized by someone I trust". At that point you need identity and authorization as separate layers, and most current solutions kind of mash them together.

Pods in AgentLair give you namespace isolation (each pod gets its own vault, email, keys), which helps for the multi-tenant case. But the trust problem across organizations is still largely unsolved infrastructure-wise.

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