problem
Documents are inert even when they contain structure. The moment an artifact is attached and sent, it sheds its schema, its behavior, and its history — arriving as bytes that the receiver must re-divine.
~/projects/avoidantemail
Avoidant
prototype# structured attachments — portable artifacts with affordances
Attachments that carry data, schema, behavior, provenance, and executable handles across email, decentralized social protocols, documents, WASM, MCP, GraphQL, and other introspectable systems.
Documents that can be inspected, replayed, and acted on without losing their shape.
The name works twice: Avoidant reduces dependency. An envelope-carrying artifact doesn't need its parent application, the sender's SaaS, a vendor's viewer, or a live link that must outlive the file — everything required to interpret and act on it travels with it.
thesis
An attachment should be an envelope: payload plus schema plus provenance plus the verbs it supports. Transport should change where an artifact is, not what it can do.
envelope
what travels together
payload
The data itself, in its native shape.
schema
What the data claims to be, checkable on arrival.
provenance
Where it came from, what produced it, what it derives from.
affordance handles
The executable verbs the artifact carries: render, validate, replay, diff, act.
no dependencies
The point of carrying all of it: nothing external is load-bearing. No parent app, no vendor viewer, no link rot, no company that has to still exist. Self-reliant artifacts form healthier attachments.
transports
bindings, not rewrites
The universal substrate — envelopes as structured MIME, degradable to plain attachments.
decentralized social
Artifacts as first-class records in AT-proto-shaped systems.
MCP / GraphQL / WASM
Introspectable systems where the handles can actually execute.
documents
Embedded artifacts that keep their affordances inside larger inert files.
signals
the inbox is becoming a runtime
The transport layer is getting agent-grade upgrades right now. The artifact layer isn't — that asymmetry is the opening.
Cloudflare email for agents
Email Service hit public beta (April 2026) billed as "ready for your agents": a first-class onEmail hook in the Agents SDK, signed reply routing, and an agentic-inbox reference client. The endpoint is programmable now; the payload is still bytes.
AgentMail and kin
agentmail.to (YC S25, $6M seed) gives every agent its own inbox — send, receive, parse, thread, label. A funded category built on agents living in email; none of it makes the attachment itself any smarter.
the gap
Everyone is upgrading the actors — agent senders, agent inboxes, agent clients — while the thing that travels stays inert. Avoidant upgrades the artifact.
archaeology
mine the archives that already exist
The envelope doesn't need sender adoption to prove value. Decades of email already exist; extraction adds the structure retroactively.
the Enron corpus
Half a million real messages, the canonical public email dataset for twenty years. Re-read it as an artifact graph: attachments retyped, threads as lineage, the same spreadsheet forwarded twelve times reconstructed as a version history.
mailing-list archives
LKML, Apache, Debian: decades of code changes traveling as inert text. Retrofitted envelopes turn patches into typed change artifacts with provenance — a version control system email kept by accident.
your own mbox
Twenty years of personal archive is a data lake nobody can query. Envelope extraction — schema, provenance, lineage recovered after the fact — is the migration path that requires zero sender cooperation.
the eval dividend
Public corpora make the claim testable: run extraction over a known archive and measure the structure recovered. The benchmark is free and the archives are already massive.
artifacts
status, honestly
envelope shapesketch
payload + schema + provenance + handles
transport bindingsroadmap
email and MCP first
archive minerroadmap
envelope extraction over Enron / mailing lists / personal mbox — value added retroactively
edges
connected investigations
Every forwarded spreadsheet is a small funeral for structure. The name is the diagnosis: today's attachments are textbook insecure. The goal — in both senses — is secure attachment.