Anjal vs Mailgun — Comparison

Of the classic transactional email providers, Mailgun is the one that gets closest to what an AI agent needs. It has had inbound routing since long before anyone was building agents, and its Routes feature genuinely parses incoming mail and posts it to your webhook. That is more than most of its competitors offer.

So the interesting question is not "does Mailgun do inbound" (it does), but what you still have to build after it hands you the parsed message.

Quick summary

	Anjal	Mailgun
What it is	Mailboxes for agents	A transactional email service with inbound routing
Entry price	$5/mo (Starter)	Free tier, then $15/mo (Basic)
Volume included	6,000 emails on Starter	10,000 emails/mo on Basic
Inbound	Real inbox, IMAP, threads kept	Routes: parse and POST to your webhook
Inbound limits by plan	Not gated	1 route on Free, 5 on Basic, full on Foundation/Scale
Log retention	Mail is stored; it is a mailbox	1 day on Free/Basic, 5 days Foundation, 30 days Scale
Threading state	Tracked, both directions	Your database
IMAP/SMTP for a human	Yes	SMTP send only
MCP server	Yes (`anjal-mcp`)	No

Pricing

Mailgun: Free at 100 emails/day, Basic starting at $15/mo with 10,000 emails/mo, Foundation at $35/mo with 50,000, Scale at $90/mo with 100,000. Foundation and Scale are free for the first month. (Mailgun pricing page, as of 2026-09.)

Anjal: Starter $5/mo (2 inboxes, 6,000 emails, 2 domains), Developer $15/mo (10 inboxes, 20,000 emails, 10 domains), Startup $199/mo (200 inboxes, 150,000 emails). Extra inboxes, domains and blocks of 1,000 emails are $2/mo each. 7-day trial.

At the $15 mark you are choosing between 10,000 emails through a sending service and 10 mailboxes with 20,000 emails. Which is better value depends entirely on whether you need mailboxes.

Two numbers on the Mailgun plans worth reading carefully

Both are on their pricing page and both matter more for agents than for the transactional use case the plans were designed around.

Inbound routes are plan-gated. The Free plan gets 1 inbound route, Basic gets 5, and full inbound routing starts at Foundation ($35/mo). If your design is "one address per agent, per customer or per campaign", routes are the wrong shape for it: you are working around a limit rather than with a primitive.

Log retention is 1 day on Basic. Mailgun logs are not a mail store, and they are not meant to be. An agent that needs to answer "what did this customer say three weeks ago" is asking for a mailbox, and on Basic the record is gone the next day. You would put every message in your own database, which means you are storing and indexing mail yourself.

Neither is a flaw in Mailgun. They are what you would expect from a product built to deliver mail and report on delivery, which is what Mailgun is.

What you still write on top of Mailgun

Routes give you a parsed message, which is genuinely useful and saves the MIME work. After that, for an agent loop, you still own:

Threading. Mailgun does not hold a thread. You read Message-ID, In-Reply-To and References on the way in, store them, and write them correctly on the way out. Get this wrong and every reply your agent sends starts a fresh thread in the recipient's Gmail, which is the single most common way agent email looks broken.
The store. Messages, threads, read state, search. Retention above is why.
Addressing. A route is a pattern plus an action. An inbox is an addressable object with its own state. If you want 200 agents with 200 addresses, you are building the mapping.
Prompt-injection defence. Inbound mail is attacker-controlled text heading for an LLM. Anjal scans every inbound message and quarantines the ones that combine a hostile pattern with a model judgement, before the agent reads it. On Mailgun the parsed body goes straight to your webhook and into your prompt.
Human access. When someone wants to look at what the agent has been saying, IMAP in Apple Mail beats a log viewer. Mailgun is SMTP-send; there is no mailbox to open.

Where Mailgun is straightforwardly better

Deliverability tooling and reputation at volume. Mailgun has been doing this since 2010, with dedicated IPs, warmup, and analytics built for people who send a lot. If your problem is "300,000 marketing emails need to land", that is their home ground and not ours.
The free tier. 100 emails/day at $0 is a real on-ramp. Anjal has a 7-day trial and no permanent free tier.
Validation and list hygiene products. Mailgun sells email validation as a product. We check MX records and stop there.
It is a known quantity in procurement. Sinch owns it, there is a SOC 2 report, and your security review has probably seen it before.

Where Anjal is better

The inbox is the primitive, not a route. Create one by API, get an address, threads, unread state, IMAP and SMTP credentials, and a calendar.
Threading is handled in both directions, so replies land as continuations rather than new conversations.
Mail is stored because it is a mailbox, not retained for a day because it is a log.
Agents connect over MCP. Point Claude, ChatGPT or Codex at mcp.anjal.app and the mailbox arrives as tools.
Inbound is treated as hostile. Quarantine is on by default.
Multi-tenancy is first-class. Workspaces isolate customers from each other, with keys scoped to one workspace.

Verdict

Mailgun if you are sending, with some inbound handling on the side. Its inbound routing is real and it will save you the parsing layer.

Anjal if the inbound side is the point. If your agent's job is to hold a conversation rather than to deliver a notification, you want a mailbox with threads and history, not a route with a one-day log.

Try it: anjal.app. Related: Anjal vs Amazon SES, Anjal vs Resend, Anjal vs Postmark.

Mailgun pricing and plan limits quoted from mailgun.com/pricing as of 2026-09. Check the source before deciding on the numbers.