Retention Policies: How Long Should an Agent Keep Mail?

<p>An AI agent with its own mailbox reacts to whatever lands in it. That's the point, until a spam blast, a mailer-daemon loop, or an auto-reply triggers the agent into answering

<p>CI alert email is noisy, and most of it is ignorable. If you've ever owned a pipeline at any scale, you know the shape of it: a flaky integration test trips, GitHub Actions

<p>You give your AI agent a real mailbox, it sends its first batch of email, and half of it lands in spam. The agent did nothing wrong. The domain did — it's new, it has no

<p>Most "AI email" demos point a model at a human's inbox and let it flail through whatever's there. That's fine for a read-only assistant. But the moment your agent <em>owns</em>

<p>Most teams test email by <em>not</em> testing it. The send path gets a mock — <code>expect(transport.send).toHaveBeenCalledWith(...)</code> — and everyone agrees that's "good

<p>You've built the agent, the reply loop works, the demo lands — and then someone asks the question you didn't budget time for: "so what address does it send from?" Suddenly

<p>Most "AI email" demos point a model at a human's inbox over OAuth. That's fine until you want the agent to <em>be</em> a participant — to have its own address that people reply

<p>OAuth grants answer the question "can this app act as me?" An autonomous agent needs an answer to a different question: "can this thing act as itself?" Most teams wire an AI