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Nylas Agent Accounts

Nylas Agent Accounts are fully functional email and calendar identities that you create and control through the Nylas API. Each Agent Account is a real [email protected] mailbox — it sends and receives email, hosts and responds to calendar events, and is indistinguishable from a human-operated account to anyone interacting with it.

This is a different model from pointing an AI agent at a human’s inbox. An Agent Account gives the agent a first-class identity — its own address, its own mailbox, its own calendar — that people and other agents communicate with directly. Think of it the way you’d think of any other user in your organization: reachable, persistent, and accountable for its own interactions.

Under the hood, an Agent Account is just another grant. It gets a grant_id that works with every existing Nylas endpoint — Messages, Drafts, Threads, Folders, Attachments, Calendars, Events, Webhooks — so anything you’ve built for connected accounts works for Agent Accounts with no new concepts.

How teams use Agent Accounts

Section titled “How teams use Agent Accounts”

Sales outreach agent. A [email protected] mailbox runs cold outreach campaigns, threads replies through the Messages API, and classifies responses (interested / not now / unsubscribe) with an LLM. When a prospect says yes to a meeting, the same grant creates an event on the agent’s own calendar and sends the invite.

Customer support triage. A [email protected] Agent Account receives every inbound support email. Rules block known spam domains at the SMTP stage, auto-route invoices to a finance folder, and mark VIP senders for immediate attention. An LLM drafts replies to common questions; humans approve the sensitive ones via a webhook flow.

Scheduling bot with its own calendar. A scheduling agent owns [email protected], parses meeting requests with an LLM, checks availability against its own calendar, proposes slots, and creates events that participants accept as normal invitations. See the scheduling-agent tutorial.

Agent signup and testing. A test agent provisions a fresh inbox per run, signs up for a third-party service, receives the verification email, extracts the link or OTP, and completes onboarding — no human in the loop. The inbox gets torn down when the test ends. See the signup automation recipe.

Voice-to-email follow-up. A voice agent taking support calls sends documents, reset instructions, or meeting recaps from its own [email protected] address the moment the caller asks. The reply returns through the same Agent Account so the full conversation is one thread in the mailbox.

Per-customer agent identities. A multi-tenant app provisions one Agent Account per customer on each customer’s own verified domain — [email protected], [email protected] — each with its own policy, send quota, and sender reputation. All of them run in one Nylas application with the same code path.

How Agent Accounts work

Section titled “How Agent Accounts work”

When you create an Agent Account, Nylas provisions a real mailbox on a domain you’ve registered (or on a Nylas-provided *.nylas.email trial domain). The account gets:

  • An email address that can send outbound mail and receive inbound mail like any other mailbox.
  • Six system folders provisioned automatically (inbox, sent, drafts, trash, junk, archive), plus any custom folders you create.
  • A primary calendar that can host events and RSVP to invitations over standard iCalendar/ICS.
  • A grant_id you use with the existing Nylas endpoints for messages, events, attachments, and webhooks.

You create Agent Accounts three ways: with the Nylas CLI (nylas agent account create <email>), from the Dashboard, or with POST /v3/connect/custom using "provider": "nylas" — the same Bring Your Own Authentication endpoint used for other providers. You can optionally attach a policy at creation to apply limits, spam detection, and inbound filtering rules.

Inbound mail fires the standard message.created webhook, identical in shape to message.created for any other grant. Branch on the grant’s provider ("nylas") to distinguish Agent Account deliveries from connected-grant deliveries.

What you can do

Section titled “What you can do”
CapabilityDescriptionPage
Provision accountsRegister a domain and create Agent Accounts on it — from the CLI (nylas agent account create), the Dashboard, or the API.Provisioning and domains
Send and receive emailUse the same /messages and /messages/send endpoints you use for connected grants. Inbound attachment limits are set by your plan and the grant’s policy; outbound is subject to standard email size limits.Messages API
Host calendar eventsCreate events, accept invitations, and RSVP on the primary calendar through the Events API.Events API
Apply policiesBundle limits, spam detection, retention, and linked rules; assign one policy to many accounts.Policies, Rules, and Lists
Filter inbound messagesMatch on from.address, from.domain, or from.tld and run actions like block, mark_as_spam, or assign_to_folder.Policies, Rules, and Lists
Maintain allow/block listsTyped collections of domains, TLDs, or addresses that rules reference through the in_list operator.Policies, Rules, and Lists
Receive webhooksSubscribe to message.created and the other grant-scoped triggers to be notified of inbound mail, state changes, and calendar activity.Webhooks
Expose IMAP and SMTPGive end users direct mail-client access to the Agent Account over standard IMAP and SMTP submission, alongside the API.Mail client access

Known limits

Section titled “Known limits”
DimensionDefaultNotes
Send rate100 messages per account per daySoft limit. Higher volume available on paid plans.
Storage1 GB per accountHigher storage available on paid plans.
Retention7 daysConfigurable through policy retention limits.
Multi-domainUnlimitedOne Nylas application can manage Agent Accounts across any number of registered domains.

Before you begin

Section titled “Before you begin”

To provision Agent Accounts, you also need a domain registered with Nylas — either a Nylas-provided *.nylas.email trial subdomain or your own custom domain with MX and TXT records configured. See Provisioning and domains.

Section titled “Related resources”