Email for agents

An agent can have its own email address. You control who it may email, who may email it, and what happens to mail from senders it does not know.

An agent can send and receive email from its own address. Mail it sends comes from that address, and replies come back to the agent as messages in its chats. Who it may write to, and who may write to it, is yours to control under the agent's email settings. For what an agent is and who manages it, see Agents, ownership, and visibility.

That address is a real mailbox that Bolter runs. It needs no outside mail account and no connected provider: an agent with an address can send and receive from the moment it has one, whether or not anyone has connected Google Workspace or anything else to the workspace. Connecting Google is for reading and writing a person's own mailbox, which is a different thing entirely. See Google connector.

Finding an agent's email settings

Open the agent's profile, go to the Advanced tab, then the Email sub-tab. The agent's creator can manage these settings, and so can an owner or admin of the workspace the agent belongs to.

The settings screen has three sections:

• Inbound Email Mode. How the agent treats mail from senders it does not know yet.
• Email Rules. Addresses and domains you allow or block. These apply both ways: who the agent may email, and who may email it.
• Pending Screening. Mail held from unknown senders, waiting for your decision.

The agent's own email address appears on its profile. An agent without an address cannot send until it has one.

Allowing and blocking rules

Add a rule by choosing Email address or Domain, then Allow or Block, and entering the value. An allowed address or domain is one the agent may email autonomously, and one that may reach the agent without being held for review. A blocked one is refused in both directions.

A domain allow applies to a domain your own team controls, such as your company's. It is not honored for a public or disposable mail provider (gmail.com and the like), or for the address suffix that every agent shares, because one rule there would cover many unrelated people and agents rather than the one you mean. For those, allow the specific address instead. Blocking a whole domain always works.

Mail from unknown senders

Under Inbound Email Mode, Screened is the default: mail from a sender the agent does not know is held in Pending Screening for you to decide. From a held email you can allow the sender, allow their whole domain, allow just that one message, or block the sender, their domain, or just that one message. Open delivers mail from every sender without asking. Closed refuses anything from a sender or domain that is not already allowed.

What the agent may send

An agent may always email its owner. The owner's verified email address counts as allowed without any rule.

When the agent sends on its own, such as on a schedule or for background work you asked for, every recipient must be someone you have allowed: an address or a domain you have allowed in Email Rules, a sender you approved from Pending Screening, or the owner's verified address.

If the agent tries to email someone you have not allowed yet, the email is not lost and nothing goes out. It is held, and an approval card arrives as a direct message from the agent, showing the recipients, subject, and full message. From the card you can approve and send it, or decline it. Approving also remembers your choice for next time: allow those addresses from now on, allow their whole domain when they share one your team controls, or send just this once. Declining sends nothing and blocks nothing; to block an address, use Email Rules. A card left undecided lapses after 7 days and the email is not sent. A send that includes a blocked or suppressed address is still refused outright, with no approval card.

That approval is not needed when you send yourself. Ask the agent to draft the email, open the draft it posts in the chat, and press Send. The review step lets the email go out for any recipient that is not suppressed, the agent's own address, or one you have explicitly blocked.

Suppressed addresses

An address that has hard-bounced or raised a spam complaint is suppressed across Bolter and cannot be emailed, whatever the rules say.