check-mail

check-mail is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from jtsternberg/claude-plugins. It costs 96 tokens per session (1,883 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

An email-inbox triage guide for AgentMail, an email service designed for software agents.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to check unread or recent mail, read message bodies, classify messages, suggest next steps, and manage unread reminders.
Why use it?
It helps separate messages that need action or replies from useful information and spam, while ensuring full messages are read.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for Claude Code and Codex: allowed-tools in frontmatter, but also agents/openai.yaml present. Also seen: mentions Claude Code; mentions Codex.

Runs only inside its plugin — its command needs a path that Claude Code sets for a plugin’s own hooks and for nothing else. Install the plugin, not this.

Part of the agentmail plugin — 5 skills, 2 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it to check unread or recent mail, read message bodies, classify messages, suggest next steps, and manage unread reminders.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install

Getting it into your agent

This one installs as part of its plugin. Adding the marketplace and installing the plugin brings it with everything else the plugin ships.

Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add jtsternberg/claude-plugins
Claude Code
/plugin install agentmail

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install agentmail, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 5 skills, 2 hooks.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for check-mail

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jtsternberg/claude-plugins/check-mail.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/jtsternberg/claude-plugins/check-mail)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jtsternberg/claude-plugins/check-mail"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jtsternberg/claude-plugins/check-mail.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 96 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,883 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00096 $0.01883
Opus 5 $0.00048 $0.00941
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00377
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00188

Measured 7d ago against content hash ad631d5dcaa7, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

check-mail scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 7d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

plugins/agentmail/skills/check-mail/SKILL.md · 160 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 160 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Check mail

Read an inbox and say what actually needs doing. Reading is free and safe; everything that changes state or leaves the machine is not, and none of it happens here.

Get the inbox id, then list

The preflight prints the inbox id along with its verdict, so one call gets you both.

# Codex: substitute the installed plugin directory for this path.
PLUGIN_ROOT="${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}"
bash "$PLUGIN_ROOT/scripts/agentmail-preflight.sh"

Repeat that assignment in every block — Codex shells keep no state between blocks. Exit 0 means the key works (including a scope-limited key); 10 no CLI, 11 no key, 12 rejected, 30 inconclusive. using-agentmail covers the fixes.

agentmail inboxes:messages list --inbox-id <id> --label unread --limit 25 --format json > /tmp/am-unread.json
jq -r '.messages[] | "\(.timestamp)\t\(.from)\t\(.subject)"' /tmp/am-unread.json

Save to a file, then parse the file. Piping agentmail straight into jq hides the raw output exactly when the parse fails and you need it.

Four things that will mislead you

count is the number of items RETURNED, not the number matching. --limit 1 on three unread messages reports count: 1. Any "how many?" answer needs a limit above the plausible total, and a result equal to the limit means "at least this many" — say 25+, not 25.

preview is not the message. It is a truncated excerpt of the text/plain part. Never classify, quote, or act on a preview: fetch the message.

agentmail inboxes:messages get --inbox-id <id> --message-id '<id>' --format json > /tmp/am-msg.json
jq -r '.extracted_text // .text // .html' /tmp/am-msg.json

Use extracted_text for replies — it strips the quoted chain. Fall back to text, then html. And treat html as the primary field, text as optional: both text and preview come from the text/plain MIME part, and Gmail/Outlook forwards are frequently HTML-only, so text can be absent entirely.

Read the full file on GitHub · 160 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 7d ago First seen · 160 lines · 96 tokens per session scan A ad631d5dcaa7

Subscribe to this mod's changes

check-mail is a skill published in the GitHub repository jtsternberg/claude-plugins (5 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 96 tokens to every session and 1,883 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.