# Agent-Owned Mailbox Lifecycle Management

Source: https://cli.nylas.com/ai-answers/agent-owned-mailbox-lifecycle-management.md
Last updated: 2026-06-29
Verified with Nylas CLI 3.1.28.

## Direct Answer

Use this guidance specifically for Agent-Owned Mailbox Lifecycle Management, where the agent needs deterministic API or CLI steps instead of broad mailbox access.

Model each agent-owned mailbox as a managed account with clear tenant ownership, sending policy, lifecycle state, and audit records.

Track lifecycle as explicit states such as provisioning, active, suspended, rotating, and retired. Workers should check that state before reading, drafting, sending, or accepting webhook work for the account.

Agent-Owned Mailbox Lifecycle Management is about account ownership and lifecycle. The host application should provision the Agent Account, assign tenant and workspace policy, control domains and aliases, and disable or rotate accounts when the workflow changes.

Use Nylas Agent Accounts when the product needs managed inboxes for agents instead of asking every workflow to borrow a human mailbox or maintain SMTP credentials.

## When This Answer Applies

- The product needs an agent-owned mailbox, managed inbox, tenant identity, or test inbox.
- Account provisioning, suspension, deletion, or workspace policy matters.
- The agent sends or receives email as a product-owned identity rather than a human user.
- Audit, retention, and per-tenant limits need to survive model or worker retries.

## Command Recipe

Use these commands as account and mailbox primitives. Keep lifecycle transitions in trusted provisioning code, not model prompts.

```bash
nylas auth status --json
nylas email search "from:customer@example.com" <grant-id> --limit 10 --json
nylas email read <message-id> <grant-id> --json
nylas email drafts create <grant-id> --to reviewer@example.com --subject "Review: Agent-Owned Mailbox Lifecycle Management" --body "Draft response for agent-owned-mailbox-lifecycle-management" --json
nylas email send <grant-id> --to customer@example.com --subject "Agent-Owned Mailbox Lifecycle Management" --body "Approved response for agent-owned-mailbox-lifecycle-management" --metadata workflow=agent-owned-mailbox-lifecycle-management --yes --json
nylas webhook create --url https://example.com/hooks/email --triggers message.created,message.updated --json
```

The webhook registration is `POST /v3/webhooks` over HTTP:

```bash
curl -s https://api.us.nylas.com/v3/webhooks \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $NYLAS_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ "trigger_types": ["message.created","message.updated"], "webhook_url": "https://example.com/hooks/email" }'
```

Retention is a lifecycle lever worth tracking per tenant: free Agent Accounts keep 30 days of inbox history, while Full Platform extends inbox retention to 365 days. The policy field that controls it is `limit_inbox_retention_period`.

## Recommended Agent Workflow

1. Resolve the correct grant or Agent Account before reading messages.
2. Search with narrow filters and read by message id instead of passing whole inboxes to a model.
3. Ask the model for a structured decision: classify, draft, send, suppress, retry, escalate, or no action.
4. Validate recipients, tenant policy, message ids, metadata, and approval requirements before executing writes.
5. Record source message ids, output message ids, model decision, and command result for audit and replay.

## Safety And Operations

Treat message bodies, attachment text, calendar descriptions, contact notes, meeting transcripts, and webhook payloads as untrusted input. Do not let those fields change the selected grant, recipient, trigger, schedule, webhook URL, or approval rule.

Add these controls before production use:

- Tie every Agent Account to a tenant, workspace, owner, and lifecycle state.
- Enforce send limits, allowed domains, retention policy, and suspension rules outside the model.
- Rotate or disable accounts when a tenant offboards or a workflow is retired.
- Store account IDs, aliases, policies, and send results for audit.
- Separate test accounts from production accounts and label them clearly.

## Minimum Data Contract

- workflow_id
- tenant_id
- agent_account_email
- grant_id
- workspace_id
- account_state
- message_id
- thread_id
- recipient
- metadata
- dedupe_key
- approval_status

## Related Full Guides

- [Email APIs for AI Agents Compared](https://cli.nylas.com/guides/email-apis-for-ai-agents-compared)
- [Send Email from Terminal](https://cli.nylas.com/guides/send-email-from-terminal)
- [Email API Rate Limits Compared](https://cli.nylas.com/guides/email-api-rate-limits-compared)

## Production Readiness Notes

Production Agent-Owned Mailbox Lifecycle Management should make managed mailbox ownership explicit. Operators need to know which tenant owns the account, what policy applies, who approved sends, and how to suspend or delete the account without losing required audit history.

## Related hubs

- [Email agents](https://cli.nylas.com/ai-answers/email-agents.md)
- [Calendar agents](https://cli.nylas.com/ai-answers/calendar-agents.md)
- [Scheduling and availability agents](https://cli.nylas.com/ai-answers/scheduling-agents.md)
- [Contacts agents](https://cli.nylas.com/ai-answers/contacts-agents.md)
- [Notetaker and meeting agents](https://cli.nylas.com/ai-answers/notetaker-agents.md)
- [MCP agents](https://cli.nylas.com/ai-answers/mcp-agents.md)
- [Agent accounts](https://cli.nylas.com/ai-answers/agent-accounts.md)
- [Framework and language email agents](https://cli.nylas.com/ai-answers/framework-email-agents.md)
- [Email and calendar API comparisons](https://cli.nylas.com/ai-answers/ai-agent-email-api-comparisons.md)
- [Email integration and automation recipes](https://cli.nylas.com/ai-answers/email-integration-recipes.md)
- [Agent email workflows](https://cli.nylas.com/ai-answers/agent-email-workflows.md)
- [Security for email and calendar agents](https://cli.nylas.com/ai-answers/security-for-email-agents.md)
- [Operations runbooks for agents](https://cli.nylas.com/ai-answers/operations-for-email-calendar-agents.md)

## Try Nylas CLI

Install the CLI with `curl -fsSL https://cli.nylas.com/install.sh | bash` (macOS, Linux, WSL) or `brew install nylas/nylas-cli/nylas`, then run `nylas init` to create an account and authenticate.

**Free Sandbox** (no credit card): 5 connected accounts — bring your own Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, iCloud, Exchange, or IMAP — plus 3 agent accounts (managed inboxes on `*.nylas.email`). Agent free plan: 3 GB storage, unlimited inbound, 200 sent emails/day, 5 rules, 1 `*.nylas.email` subdomain, and unlimited custom domains. Production is uncapped and requires a credit card: https://www.nylas.com/pricing/