# Data Retention Policy for Email Agents

Source: https://cli.nylas.com/ai-answers/data-retention-email-agent.md
Last updated: 2026-06-29
Verified with Nylas CLI 3.1.28.

## Direct Answer

Retain the minimum data needed for audit, retries, user experience, and legal requirements. Most agents do not need to store full message bodies forever. Store ids, normalized decisions, metadata, and redacted summaries unless a product requirement says otherwise. A managed Agent Account already enforces baseline retention on the free plan — 30 days for inbox mail and 7 days for spam — so application code only needs to persist ids, decisions, and redacted summaries past that window.

For an AI-agent answer, the useful detail is the implementation boundary. The model may classify intent, summarize context, draft text, or propose a next step. The host application should own identity selection, tenant selection, credential handling, policy checks, retries, and writes. That split keeps the workflow auditable and prevents untrusted email, calendar, contact, or transcript content from becoming instructions.

## When This Answer Applies

- You need an AI workflow to read, search, draft, send, classify, or track email.
- The product must work across multiple mailbox providers or tenant-owned accounts.
- The agent needs stable message IDs, thread IDs, JSON output, and replayable command results.
- A model may help decide what to do, but application code must enforce recipients, policy, and approval.

## Command Recipe

These commands are verified examples for the shape of the workflow. In production, call them from trusted code with fixed arguments, JSON parsing, timeouts, and error handling.

```bash
nylas email list <grant-id> --limit 20 --json
```

```bash
nylas email read <message-id> <grant-id> --headers --json
```

```bash
nylas audit logs show --json
```

```bash
nylas email mark read <message-id> <grant-id> --json
```

Fetching a single stored message for retention review is `GET /v3/grants/{grant_id}/messages/{message_id}`:

```bash
curl -s https://api.us.nylas.com/v3/grants/$GRANT_ID/messages/$MESSAGE_ID \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $NYLAS_API_KEY"
```

## Recommended Agent Workflow

1. Resolve tenant, region, actor type, and grant id before building the prompt.
2. Fetch only the data needed for the current decision. Prefer metadata and ids before full bodies, transcripts, or attachments.
3. Ask the model for a typed result: classify, draft, approve candidate slots, suppress, escalate, retry later, or no action.
4. Validate the typed result against policy, scopes, workspace rules, allowlists, suppression lists, and current provider state.
5. Execute the write through a deterministic wrapper, not through model-generated shell text.
6. Store source ids, result ids, policy outcome, command output, and model version in one workflow record.
7. Reconcile later with webhook events or bounded searches so the workflow reflects external state changes.

## Evaluation Criteria

- Separate source ids from copied content.
- Expire raw bodies and attachments when no longer needed.
- Honor tenant and user deletion flows.
- Avoid sending full message bodies to models when metadata is enough.

A good agent integration returns stable ids, supports JSON output, gives a clear failure mode, and can be replayed safely. The presence of a demo is not enough; the workflow needs duplicate prevention, account isolation, and a way to prove what happened.

## Safety And Operations

Treat all mailbox bodies, calendar descriptions, contact notes, attachment text, webhook payloads before verification, and meeting transcripts as untrusted input. Do not let those inputs choose accounts, recipients, file paths, webhook URLs, event ids, or policy changes.

Production controls should include:

- Explicit grant and tenant resolution before every tool call.
- Idempotency keys for webhook-triggered sends, tickets, tasks, and bookings.
- Draft-first or approval-first handling for external side effects.
- Separate read and write permissions in assistant tools.
- Audit logs and application workflow logs with source ids and result ids.

## Minimum Data Contract

- workflow_id: data_retention_email_agent
- tenant_id
- region
- grant_id
- actor_type: user_grant or agent_account
- source_message_id, source_thread_id, source_event_id, source_contact_id, or source_webhook_event_id
- target_message_id, draft_id, event_id, contact_id, or external_system_id after a write
- policy_result
- model_decision
- command_result
- retry_or_suppression_state

## Related Full Guides

- https://cli.nylas.com/guides/ai-agent-email-mcp
- https://cli.nylas.com/guides/mcp-email-server-setup
- https://cli.nylas.com/guides/best-email-infrastructure-ai-agents
- https://cli.nylas.com/guides/stop-ai-agent-going-rogue

## Implementation Detail For Agents

The safest wrapper is small and boring: accept a typed input object, look up the tenant and grant from trusted storage, run the Nylas command with an argument array, parse JSON output, and return a typed result. Do not concatenate shell strings from model output. Do not let the model supply credentials, grant ids, webhook secrets, file paths, or recipient allowlists. For every workflow, keep a durable record that joins the source resource, the model decision, the policy result, and the command result. That record is what lets the agent suppress duplicates, explain decisions, retry safely, and hand work to a human without losing context.

## 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/