Email & Communication Agents

Your AI reads, drafts, triages, and sends email -- so you don't have to.

Email is the single biggest time sink in business. An AI agent that triages your inbox, drafts responses in your voice, schedules follow-ups, and sends routine messages saves hours every week. This lesson builds that agent.

What you'll learn

Setting up automated email sending with Resend or SMTP
Building an email triage system: priority, category, suggested action
Drafting responses in your voice using brain context
Template systems for recurring email patterns

Architecture

The Email Agent Stack

A complete email agent needs four components:

Reading (inbox access). Connect to your email via IMAP, Gmail API, or MCP integration. The agent reads incoming messages, extracting sender, subject, body, and attachments.

Triage (classification). The agent classifies each email: priority (urgent, normal, low), category (client, billing, support, spam), and suggested action (reply, forward, archive, flag for human review).

Drafting (response generation). For emails that need a response, the agent drafts in your voice using brain context -- your identity, your communication style, your relationship with the sender, your current projects.

Sending (outbound delivery). The agent sends emails via Resend API, SMTP, or your email provider's API. Proper authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) ensures deliverability.

Implementation

Sending Email with Resend

Resend is the simplest way to send transactional email from code. One API call, proper authentication, great deliverability:

// Install: npm install resend
import { Resend } from 'resend';

// Initialize with your API key
const resend = new Resend(process.env.RESEND_API_KEY);

// Send an email
async function sendEmail(to, subject, body) {
  const response = await resend.emails.send({
    from: 'you@yourdomain.com',     // Must be verified domain
    to: to,                           // Recipient
    subject: subject,                 // Subject line
    html: body,                       // HTML body (or use 'text' for plain)
    bcc: 'archive@yourdomain.com'    // BCC yourself for records
  });
  return response;
}

// Example: send a client follow-up
await sendEmail(
  'client@company.com',
  'Following up on our conversation',
  'Hi Sarah,
Thanks for the call today. As discussed, here are the next steps...'
);

Strategy

Email Triage System

The triage system reads each incoming email and classifies it using your local AI or cloud model:

// Triage prompt -- sent to your AI with the email content
const triagePrompt = `
You are an email triage agent for a business owner.
Classify this email:

From: ${email.from}
Subject: ${email.subject}
Body: ${email.body.substring(0, 1000)}

Respond with JSON:
{
  "priority": "urgent|normal|low",
  "category": "client|billing|support|newsletter|spam|personal",
  "action": "reply|forward|archive|flag|delete",
  "summary": "One sentence summary",
  "draft_reply": "If action is reply, draft a response. Otherwise null."
}

Rules:
- Emails from known clients are always priority: normal or urgent
- Newsletters and marketing are always priority: low, action: archive
- Anything mentioning money, deadlines, or problems is priority: urgent
`;

Run this through your local Ollama model for routine classification (free, fast) and escalate to Claude for emails that need nuanced drafting (better quality). The triage itself costs nothing when run locally.

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