Admissions inboxes are a grind. Most of what lands in admissions@yourschool.edu is some variation of the same three questions — what's the deadline, what documents do I still need, did you get my transcript — interleaved with the documents themselves arriving as PDF attachments. A human reads each one, looks up the applicant in the SIS, checks which docs are still outstanding, and writes back. Then, a week before the deadline, someone exports a spreadsheet and manually nudges everyone who hasn't finished.
The naive "AI" version of this points an LLM at a counselor's personal mailbox and lets it draft replies. That works right up until you want the agent to be the admissions desk — to send mail under its own address, receive replies in its own thread, hold the application state for every applicant, and fire deadline reminders without a human in the loop. A drafting assistant bolted onto a person's inbox can't do that. It has no identity of its own.
This post builds the version that does, on a Nylas Agent Account. I work on the Nylas CLI, so every step below is shown twice: the raw curl against the API, and the nylas command I'd actually type. Pick whichever fits where the operation lives — your webhook worker probably speaks HTTP, but your ops runbook and your one-off debugging speak CLI.
