What is an Email Agent?

The simplest version drafts replies for a human to approve and send — useful, but still requires a human touch on every message. A more autonomous email agent can triage an inbox (flagging what's urgent, archiving what's routine), draft context-aware replies using information from a CRM or knowledge base, and in some configurations send routine responses without a human in the loop, escalating anything ambiguous or high-stakes. The hard problems are less about generating plausible-sounding text and more about grounding: an agent needs the right context (who is this person, what's the history, what does the company's policy say) to write a reply that's actually correct, not just fluent. Getting the autonomy boundary right — what it can send unsupervised versus what needs a human — is usually the difference between a genuinely useful email agent and one that erodes trust the first time it sends something wrong. Email agents typically integrate with the same inbox APIs (Gmail, Outlook) a human would use, plus OAuth-scoped access rather than shared credentials.