Nylas
Nylas gives you a unified email API. Mailgator gives you email access control that never leaves your network.
Both work with existing inboxes — but they have very different answers to the question of where your email data lives.
| Mailgator | Nylas | |
|---|---|---|
| What it does | IMAP/SMTP proxy with permission rules | Unified email/calendar API |
| Data location | Your infrastructure, always | Nylas cloud servers |
| Access granularity | Folder, sender, operation-level rules | OAuth scopes (broad) |
| Credential handling | Never leaves your machine | Stored on Nylas servers |
| Human-in-the-loop | Built-in ask action |
No |
| Calendar/contacts | No (email only) | Yes, unified API |
| Setup | Single binary + TOML file | OAuth app + API integration |
| Pricing | From €3/mo flat | Free tier, then per-connected-account |
If you need to read calendar events and contacts alongside email, Nylas covers all three with one API. Mailgator only handles email. For product features that span the full communication stack, Nylas is purpose-built for that use case.
Nylas handles the OAuth dance with Gmail, Outlook, and others. If you're building a multi-tenant SaaS where end users connect their own accounts, Nylas makes that straightforward. Mailgator doesn't solve that multi-tenant use case.
Nylas has been around since 2013. The docs are thorough, the SDKs are polished, and there's a large community building on it. If you want a battle-tested integration layer with extensive resources, Nylas delivers that.
Nylas routes email through their cloud — every message, every attachment. Mailgator runs entirely on your infrastructure. For teams with data residency requirements, GDPR concerns, or strict compliance needs, this is the difference that matters. Your email stays where you put it.
OAuth scopes are broad. "Read email" means all email. Mailgator lets you write rules like "allow reading from Invoices folder, deny everything else." You define exactly what operations an agent can perform — read, send, delete, move — on a per-folder and per-sender basis.
The ask action pauses an operation and waits for a human to approve or deny it. Sending an email from the CEO's account? Your security team gets a notification first. Nylas has no equivalent — it exposes the full scope of the OAuth grant to your application.
Mailgator is €3/mo or €12/mo. That's it. Nylas pricing scales per connected account and API call volume, which gets expensive fast when you're connecting dozens of mailboxes or running high-volume automations.
Nylas makes sense if you're building a SaaS product where end users connect their own email accounts via OAuth. Think: a CRM, a recruiting tool, or a customer support platform that needs to sync email and calendar data from thousands of users. Nylas was designed for exactly this multi-tenant, cloud-native pattern.
Mailgator is the better pick when you control the infrastructure and need to restrict what an AI agent or automation can do with a specific mailbox. Different architecture, different problem — and if data residency matters at all, Mailgator is the only option.