Most "AI for collections" demos are a glorified mail merge: a model writes three increasingly stern paragraphs, a cron job fires them on days 7, 14, and 30, and everyone claps. That's fine right up until a customer replies "we paid this last Tuesday, check your records" — and your one-way email service can't read the reply, so the agent sends the day-30 nastygram anyway. Now you've insulted a paying customer and your AR team is on the phone apologizing.
Collections isn't a send-only problem. It's a polite-but-firm sequence that has to read the replies — because the two messages that matter most ("I already paid" and "I'm disputing this charge") arrive as inbound email, and they're the two signals that should immediately stop the ladder. A dunning agent that can't receive mail is the wrong tool for the job by design.
That's the whole reason to put this on an Agent Account. An Agent Account is a real, full mailbox the agent owns — it sends and receives, threads replies, and fires webhooks on inbound mail. The escalation logic and the "stop on payment or dispute" rule are your code, but the read/write/reply plumbing is handled.
I work on the Nylas CLI, so the terminal commands below are the exact ones I reach for when I'm building and debugging one of these loops. Every step has both forms: the curl HTTP call and the nylas ... equivalent.
