Most "AI agent + email" tutorials start the same way: connect the agent to a human's inbox over OAuth, hope the token doesn't expire mid-run, and pray the agent never replies to the wrong thread on someone's behalf.
There's a different model: give the agent its own email address. Nylas recently shipped Agent Accounts (currently in beta) — fully functional, Nylas-hosted mailboxes you create and control entirely through the API. Each one is a real name@company.com address that sends, receives, hosts calendar events, and RSVPs to invitations. To anyone interacting with it, it's indistinguishable from a human-operated account.
I work on the docs at Nylas, so I've spent a lot of time with this API. Here's a tour of what it does and how to get a mailbox running in a few minutes.
Why not just connect the agent to a human inbox?
You can — that's what OAuth grants are for, and they're the right tool when the agent works on behalf of a person. But a lot of agent workflows want a first-class identity instead:
