agent-email-patterns

A set of design patterns for AI agents that communicate by email. It explains how agent inboxes, permissions, replies, drafts, webhooks, and multiple agents can fit together.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to design dedicated inboxes, human approval flows, two-way email conversations, event delivery, and multi-agent email systems.
Why use it?
It helps avoid giving an automated agent broad access to a person's mailbox, which can expose unrelated messages and make actions difficult to audit.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/agentmail-to/agentmail-plugins/agent-email-patterns
Any agent
npx skills add agentmail-to/agentmail-plugins --skill agent-email-patterns
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/agentmail-to/agentmail-plugins

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 125 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,603 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00125 $0.01603
Opus 5 $0.00063 $0.00801
Sonnet 5 $0.00025 $0.00321
Haiku 4.5 $0.00013 $0.00160

Measured 2d ago against content hash 2c2953053392, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

agent-email-patterns 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 2d 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.

skills/agent-email-patterns/SKILL.md · 121 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 121 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Agent Email Patterns

Opinionated patterns for building AI agents that communicate over email. This skill covers architecture and security decisions, not SDK specifics. For AgentMail SDK usage, use the agentmail skill.

Why agents need their own inboxes

Giving an agent OAuth access to a human's Gmail account is the most common approach and the most dangerous:

  • Over-permissioned: typical OAuth scopes (e.g. gmail.modify) grant read/send/delete over the entire mailbox history, far beyond what any single task needs
  • Prompt injection risk: the agent inherits the full inbox history as reachable context, so any crafted email already sitting in the mailbox is a live attack surface
  • Revocation granularity: OAuth tokens are hard to revoke or scope per-agent -- pulling access from one workflow often means pulling it from all of them
  • Rate limits: consumer mailbox sending limits aren't designed for automated/programmatic workflows
  • Audit trail: agent actions are mixed with human actions in the same mailbox, making debugging and compliance review hard

The safer default: one dedicated, API-native inbox per agent (see Pattern 1).

Provider landscape

Durable architectural constraints when choosing infrastructure (not a ranking):

Provider Key constraint
Gmail API No programmatic inbox creation; no WebSocket push (Pub/Sub or polling only); access is revocable by Google at any time
Resend No threads or conversation concept; cannot list/search received messages; inbound only via webhook, no persistent inbox
SendGrid Inbound parse is stateless; no thread management; no programmatic inbox creation
Amazon SES Inbound is rule-based (S3/Lambda triggers), not a mailbox; no thread management; no WebSocket support

Pattern 1: one inbox per agent

Every agent gets its own email address. Never share inboxes between agents.

client.inboxes.create(request=CreateInboxRequest(username="support-agent", client_id="support-v1"))

Read the full file on GitHub · 121 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 files 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. 2d ago First seen · 121 lines · 125 tokens per session scan A 2c2953053392

Subscribe to this mod's changes

agent-email-patterns is a skill published in the GitHub repository agentmail-to/agentmail-plugins (14 stars, last pushed 8d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 125 tokens to every session and 1,603 once invoked, about $0.0006 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 2026-08-30.

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