About Surfing Dog Inbox
Surfing Dog Inbox is a business inbox for bookings, orders, quote requests, and messages from people and their AI agents. Businesses can set rules for routine requests, review the rest, and run the open-source service themselves.
Key features
- 01Collect bookings, orders, and messages
- 02Apply rules to routine requests
- 03Show remaining requests to the business
- 04Support self-hosted deployment
- 05Provide REST and MCP interfaces
Use cases
- 01Receive customer service bookings
- 02Handle product orders and quote requests
- 03Filter routine inquiries with rules
- 04Run an inbox on a business-owned server
MCP support
Each instance exposes an MCP server for customers’ AI clients to submit business requests. A REST API is also available.
Configuration
Remote servers need no local install. Pick your client, then copy the config or install in one click.
https://inbox.surfingdog.ai/mcpclaude mcp add --transport http ai-surfingdog-inbox https://inbox.surfingdog.ai/mcp{"mcpServers":{"ai-surfingdog-inbox":{"type":"http","url":"https://inbox.surfingdog.ai/mcp"}}}Open in Cursor{"servers":{"ai-surfingdog-inbox":{"type":"http","url":"https://inbox.surfingdog.ai/mcp"}}}Open in VS Code{"mcpServers":{"ai-surfingdog-inbox":{"type":"http","url":"https://inbox.surfingdog.ai/mcp"}}}{"mcpServers":{"ai-surfingdog-inbox":{"serverUrl":"https://inbox.surfingdog.ai/mcp"}}}Run commands in a terminal; paste JSON into the client’s MCP config and restart. Servers that need sign-in will prompt on first connect.
Tools
19This tool takes no parameters.
Details
From the project READMESurfing Dog Inbox
An inbox for the bookings, orders, quote requests and messages that people and their AI agents send a business. Your rules answer the routine ones, and you see the rest. Open source, and you run it.
Try it in 60 seconds
Add our demo bike shop to Claude or ChatGPT as a custom connector (an MCP server):
https://demo.surfingdog.ai/mcp
Then ask it: "Book a bike service with Oficina Maré on Saturday morning." Watch the booking arrive, and the shop confirm it, at https://demo.surfingdog.ai/demo/live. The demo never emails anyone who uses it, shows no names and is wiped every night.
The same with curl, step by step: https://surfingdog.ai/try/
How ready is a business for AI agents today? The free AI agent readiness checker reads any website the way a customer's assistant would and shows what it can do there, and what to add.
Install
We host it for you, free during the pilot, at an address on your own domain: get your agent inbox. Or run it yourself, three ways:
On your own server: Point a subdomain, such as inbox.yourbusiness.com, at an Ubuntu or Debian server, then run one command. HTTPS, a backup every night, and updates that undo themselves if they fail.
curl -fsSL https://surfingdog.ai/install.sh | sudo sh
Docker, or a platform you use: the image ghcr.io/surfingdogai/inbox, for amd64 and arm64. The data
lives in the volume. deploy/ has the Compose file with HTTPS, and templates for Coolify,
Fly.io, Render, Railway and a DigitalOcean Droplet. By hand, it answers on the server itself only,
behind a proxy with TLS that drops a CF-Connecting-IP the caller sent:
(umask 077; echo "INBOX_SECRET_KEY=$(openssl rand -base64 32)" > inbox.env) # keep a copy somewhere safe
docker run -d --name inbox --restart unless-stopped -p 127.0.0.1:8787:8787 \
-v inbox-data:/opt/inbox/data --env-file inbox.env \
-e [email protected] -e INBOX_PUBLIC_URL=https://inbox.yourbusiness.com \
ghcr.io/surfingdogai/inbox:0.2.0
Cloudflare Workers, with D1, a queue and a cron. Press Deploy to Cloudflare. What to have ready, and what to do after, is in the quickstart. By hand, it's path A of the install guide.
From source, on Node 22.16+, 24 or 26 (one process and one SQLite file):
git clone https://github.com/surfingdogai/inbox && cd inbox
pnpm install
pnpm --filter @surfingdog/inbox build
node apps/inbox/dist/server.mjs # http://localhost:8787
Or give your AI the install guide and let it do the work: it is written for that, with a check after every step. The whole guide to running it yourself, with updates and backups: surfingdog.ai/docs/run-it-yourself.
Docs
- Quickstart: every setting, Docker, and a public demo of your own
- Connect your AI: the owner's MCP server
- API: REST and MCP; every instance also serves
/openapi.json - Decision records: read these before changing how things work
Working on it
pnpm dev # the server on Node, http://localhost:8787
pnpm dev:workers # the same app on workerd
pnpm test # every test, on Node and on Workers
./scripts/verify.sh # everything CI runs
How to send a change, ask for an integration or report a security problem: CONTRIBUTING.md and SECURITY.md.
apps/inbox: the server and the owner app, one codebase for Workers and Nodedeploy: the self-host kit: the one-command installer, the Compose file, theinboxcommand, platform templatesapps/site: surfingdog.ai, with the docs. It counts visits with Cloudflare Web Analytics only when built withWEB_ANALYTICS_TOKENset, as our deploy does; any other build sends nothing anywherepackages/core: items, their states, rules and receiptspackages/adapters: REST, MCP, sign-in, email in, webhooks and networkspackages/platform: the database, mail and job seams for each runtimepackages/spec: the discovery manifest and receipt formats, with test vectorspackages/sdk: verify webhooks; sign requests and check receipts from a customer's agentpackages/ui: design tokens and componentspackages/network-check: checks a network against the network protocolexamples/network: a small network of your own, at the protocol's directory level
Licence
MIT, for everything in this repository: the server, the app, the site, the spec, the SDK, packages/network-check and examples/network. You can run it, change it and build on it; nothing you build has to be shared. See LICENSE.
Comments
New to MCP?
From what the protocol is to installing your first server, these answers cover most first questions.
An open protocol that defines how AI applications connect to external tools and data in a uniform way. Clients talk to the model; MCP servers provide tools, resources and prompt templates. They exchange standard messages, so one server can be reused by many clients.