Email and mailbox
A mailbox as the trigger: the agent reviews what comes in, replies within the existing thread, and files away what needs filing. What goes out can pass through an approval first.
The situation
A mailbox is the oldest queue a company has, and the worst managed: no states, no ownership, no history beyond the order things arrived in. An agent working on one therefore needs more than access — it needs a task list to sort things into, a memory for the sender, and a limit on what it sends without asking.
How a mail is worked
From arrival to what is left once the thread is closed.
The mail wakes it
The mailbox connector watches the inbox. In between, the agent sleeps; at intervals a cheap check asks whether anything is there at all, rather than waking it for nothing.
It sorts it in
An email becomes a task with a status and a priority. Two triggers on the same thread do not cause duplicate work — recognising duplicates is the control plane's job, not the prompt's.
It replies within the thread
With the technical details required for that: the reply appears in the right thread for the recipient, rather than as a new message beside the old one.
It files
Attachments go to Nextcloud or SharePoint, what it learnt goes into its memory. The thread stays the thread; the knowledge from it outlives the thread.
What it works with
The systems that ship for this area. If one is missing, an MCP server is the quickest route; anyone needing their own wake-up events and finer permissions writes a plugin.
- E-Mail (IMAP/SMTP)
- Nextcloud
- SharePoint
- Microsoft Teams
What the platform enforces
What a mailbox agent does not simply do.
Send
Sending can be tied to an approval. For a mailbox, that is the setting to begin with rather than the exception.
Read everything
Its access applies to the mailbox it was hired for. An agent is not an account with full access but an employee with a desk.
Forget
Every email read and every email sent appears as an action in the recording. What an agent did at the mailbox can be read back without asking it.
Try it yourself
covey is run by you: one program, a Postgres database, Docker for the workplaces. The instructions are in the documentation.