Operations
13 posts on operations for AI agents that send and receive email.
6 August 2026 · 4 min read
The week between Christmas and New Year
Coverage gaps are predictable, and so is what arrives during them. What an agent should do when nobody is available, what it must not promise, and how to hand back a backlog.
5 August 2026 · 5 min read
Putting an agent on an inbox that already has traffic
Starting an agent on a new address is easy. Moving one that customers already write to, with expectations and history attached, needs a different plan.
4 August 2026 · 4 min read
The weekly half hour that keeps an agent honest
Dashboards tell you an agent is running. Reading fifteen threads tells you whether it is any good. What to sample, what to look for, and what to do with what you find.
3 August 2026 · 5 min read
What your team does once the agent handles the easy half
An agent changes the shape of the work rather than the amount, and the leftover pile is harder than the average was. How roles, staffing levels, and hiring change, honestly.
3 August 2026 · 4 min read
Setting response time targets you can actually keep
An agent answers in seconds, which makes it tempting to promise something you cannot hold when it escalates. How to set targets per category, measure the tail, and design the fallback.
30 July 2026 · 5 min read
The first week with an email agent, day by day
A day-by-day plan for the week that decides whether an email agent works: what to set up, what to read, what to fix, and what to hand it next.
28 July 2026 · 5 min read
What to monitor when an agent is answering your mail
The signals that catch an email agent going wrong before a customer does: send classification, first contact with new domains, silence, bounce movement, and the traces worth keeping per thread.
28 July 2026 · 5 min read
Designing approval that a human will still read in week three
Approval queues fail by being too full to read. How to choose what needs a person, design the review itself, set a timeout for unreviewed items, and know when to remove the gate.
28 July 2026 · 6 min read
The compliance floor for email an AI agent sends
An agent sending on your behalf is you sending. What CAN-SPAM, GDPR, PECR, and CASL require, how unsubscribe and suppression have to work, and what to do about disclosure and retention.
27 July 2026 · 5 min read
Test inboxes for agent development, without mocking email
How to test an email agent properly: disposable inboxes per run, replaying real threads, asserting on what was sent, and the difference between a sandbox that traps mail and a real one that delivers.
27 July 2026 · 5 min read
What email actually costs when your agents send it
Per-message pricing, per-inbox pricing, storage, and the hidden costs nobody budgets for: tokens spent parsing mail, engineering time on threading, and the price of a damaged sending domain.
26 July 2026 · 6 min read
How to tell whether your email agent is any good
Deflection rate flatters everyone. The metrics that expose a bad email agent, how to build a golden thread suite, and how to run regressions before a prompt change reaches customers.
22 July 2026 · 6 min read
Keeping an autonomous agent from becoming a spam problem
Autonomy plus email is a reputation and legal risk. The controls that actually work: send classification and tripwires, allowances, narrow approval, per-agent scope, mail rules, and an audit trail someone reads.