Run a personal doorman agent on a $7 VPS
Documented elsewhere: george Larson ran nullclaw, a small Zig agent, on a cheap VPS. It joined his own IRC server, which visitors reached through a web client. It worked for visitors, with Haiku handling chat and Sonnet handling repo reading.
- Agent or tool
- Claude
- Topic
- Email & Inbox
- Reported on
- Hacker News
- Added
- 2026-10-15
Why it matters
Email is where a lot of admin quietly piles up. An agent that can read, sort, draft and follow up turns an inbox from a to-do list into something closer to a summary. It is one of 106 sightings filed under Email & Inbox on Agent Sightings (number 32 by interest), and one of 91 involving Claude.
How you could try it
Here is a reusable prompt, written by us in our own words, that captures the task. Paste it into Claude or any similar agent and adjust the details to your situation.
Go through my mail for this goal: run a personal doorman agent on a $7 VPS. Propose labels, drafts, and unsubscribes as a checklist; change nothing until I approve.
Tip: Start with read-only access or 'draft, don't send', and check a few drafts before trusting it to send anything.
Source
Read the original first-hand account on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47536761. Our summary is a paraphrase; details are in the source.
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