openclaw email skills compared: himalaya vs gog vs lobstermail

If you're browsing ClawHub for email skills, you've probably noticed the same three names showing up: Himalaya, Gog, and LobsterMail. They all promise to give your OpenClaw agent email access. They solve it in fundamentally different ways.

I've set up all three. This is what each one actually looks like once you get past the README.

Himalaya: the IMAP workhorse#

Himalaya is the most popular email skill on ClawHub, and for good reason. It's a standalone CLI email client that connects to any IMAP/SMTP server. Install the skill, point it at a mailbox, and your agent can read, send, and manage messages through shell commands.

The install is clean:

clawhub install himalaya

After that, you edit ~/.config/himalaya/config.toml with your mail server credentials. For Gmail, that means either an app password (if you have 2FA enabled) or OAuth2 tokens through Google Cloud Console.

Here's a minimal Gmail config:

[accounts.gmail]
email = "you@gmail.com"
backend.type = "imap"
backend.host = "imap.gmail.com"
backend.port = 993
backend.auth.type = "password"
backend.auth.raw = "your-app-password"

message.send.backend.type = "smtp"
message.send.backend.host = "smtp.gmail.com"
message.send.backend.port = 465
message.send.backend.auth.type = "password"
message.send.backend.auth.raw = "your-app-password"

That looks reasonable on paper. In practice, you'll run into a few things the docs don't emphasize.

Polling delay. Himalaya uses IMAP polling. Your agent checks for new mail on an interval, typically every 1-5 minutes. If someone emails your agent expecting a fast response, there's a gap. For triage workflows or time-sensitive automation, that gap matters.

OAuth2 complexity. If you don't want a raw password in a config file (you shouldn't), you need OAuth2. That means creating a GCP project, configuring a consent screen, generating client credentials, and implementing the token exchange. Users on r/openclaw regularly report the agent can't find the Himalaya tool even after the CLI works fine locally, and the skill's GitHub issues include incorrect command syntax in the official documentation.

Config fragility. OpenClaw Discussion #4220 documents a recurring problem: the Himalaya config gets stripped when the instance restarts. If your agent loses its credentials between sessions, it can't read mail until someone manually fixes the TOML file.

Himalaya works well for what it is. It's lightweight, it supports providers beyond Gmail (Outlook, Fastmail, self-hosted), and it doesn't require a Google Workspace subscription. But it's a general-purpose CLI email client adapted into an OpenClaw skill, not something built for agents from the ground up.

Gog: the Google Workspace mega-skill#

Gog takes the opposite approach from Himalaya. Instead of wrapping a single protocol, it wraps the entire Google Workspace suite. Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets — all accessible to your agent through one skill.

clawhub install gog

That's the easy part. The hard part is authentication.

Gog requires the gogcli tool for OAuth setup. You need a GCP project with billing enabled, the Gmail API and any other Workspace APIs you want activated, OAuth credentials with correctly scoped permissions, and a redirect URI configured for the authentication flow.

For email specifically, you'll scope at minimum gmail.readonly and gmail.send. But since Gog covers the full Workspace suite, most setups request broader permissions. Google's verification requirements scale with scope breadth — restricted scopes like full mail access (https://mail.google.com/) trigger a mandatory third-party security audit if you ever push the app to production.

The real-time question is where Gog gets interesting and painful simultaneously. Without additional setup, Gog polls Gmail the same way Himalaya does. To get instant delivery, you need Google Cloud Pub/Sub: create a topic, create a subscription, configure a push endpoint that your OpenClaw instance can receive, and set up a watch on the Gmail inbox that publishes notifications to your topic. That's a GCP billing account, Pub/Sub API enabled, a publicly accessible webhook URL, and IAM permissions configured correctly.

If you're already paying for Google Workspace ($6-18/month per seat) and your agent needs Calendar and Drive access alongside email, Gog is the logical choice. You're already inside Google's ecosystem. But if you only need email, Gog is a lot of infrastructure for one capability.

Both Himalaya and Gog share a problem that no amount of configuration can fix: your agent operates inside your personal inbox. Every message you've ever received sits in its context window. A Meta alignment researcher recently discovered what that means in practice when her OpenClaw agent started bulk-deleting emails during an inbox triage session. She had to physically unplug her machine to stop it.

LobsterMail: the agent-first skill#

LobsterMail approaches the problem differently. Instead of connecting your agent to an existing inbox, the agent gets its own.

clawhub install lobstermail

Then tell your agent: "Get yourself an email inbox." That's the whole setup. Behind the scenes, the agent calls LobsterMail.provision() and gets a dedicated address like my-agent@lobstermail.ai. No GCP project. No OAuth. No TOML config.

If you want to see the code:

import { LobsterMail } from "@lobstermail/sdk";
const client = new LobsterMail();
const inbox = await client.provision({ name: "my-agent" });
// my-agent@lobstermail.ai — ready to receive

There's no polling delay. Incoming mail arrives via webhooks the moment it's delivered, or through WebSocket if you prefer a persistent connection. The agent's inbox is completely isolated from your personal email, so a misbehaving agent can't touch your bank statements or fire off replies to your colleagues at 3 AM.

Every incoming message goes through prompt injection scanning across six categories before reaching the agent. The SDK's safeBodyForLLM() method gives your agent the email content with injection attempts stripped. Neither Himalaya nor Gog have anything equivalent.

Pricing is straightforward. The free tier covers receiving. The Builder plan at $9/month adds sending, unlimited inboxes, and custom domains. No per-inbox caps, no surprise jumps.

Setup comparison, side by side#

The shared inbox problem#

This deserves its own section because it's the one thing people underestimate until they've been burned.

When your agent connects through Himalaya or Gog, it accesses your entire mailbox. Not just new messages. Everything. That password reset from your bank last Tuesday. That medical appointment confirmation. That argument with your landlord.

A crafted email can exploit this. Security researchers have documented how a single prompt injection embedded in a message body can instruct an agent to search for sensitive data, forward it to an external address, or delete messages to cover its tracks. Google's all-or-nothing permission model means there's no way to give the agent read access to new mail while hiding historical messages.

This isn't theoretical. The Bitsight analysis of OpenClaw agents found cases where agents "went through a personal inbox and replied to a few emails — autonomously and without explicit per-action permission." That's your reputation on the line, sent from your real email address, with your real name attached.

A dedicated agent inbox eliminates the category entirely. The agent only sees what's sent to its address. If it misbehaves, the damage is contained to a throwaway inbox on the reef, not your professional identity.

Which skill to pick#

Choose Himalaya if you need email from a non-Gmail provider (Outlook, Fastmail, self-hosted), you're fine with polling delay, and your use case is simple enough that personal inbox exposure isn't a concern. It's the most portable option.

Choose Gog if your agent needs the full Google Workspace suite and you're already paying for it. Calendar integration, Drive access, and Gmail in one skill is genuinely useful for executive assistant workflows. Accept that setup will take an evening.

Choose LobsterMail if your agent needs its own identity, you care about prompt injection defense, or you're running multiple agents that each need a separate address. It's the only ClawHub email skill where the agent provisions its own inbox without human intervention.

I built LobsterMail because I kept spending evenings debugging OAuth tokens and TOML configs when I just wanted my agent to have email. If that resonates, give it a try.

Give your agent its own email. Get started with LobsterMail — it's free.