Most "AI email" demos never think about deletion. The agent reads, replies, files things away, and the inbox just grows. That's fine in a demo. It is a problem the first time a real person emails your agent, because the moment that mailbox holds someone else's name, address, order history, or support complaint, you've taken on a data-protection obligation — and "we kept everything forever" is not a defensible retention policy.
An Agent Account on Nylas accumulates personal data you have to be able to purge. It's a mailbox the agent owns — support@yourcompany.com answering to a model instead of a human — and every inbound message lands in it. Under GDPR that data needs two things you can prove: a retention window so it doesn't live forever, and an erasure path so you can delete a specific person's mail when they ask. This post builds both, with the curl and the CLI for each step.
A quick, honest caveat before any of it: this is a docs-and-demo walkthrough, not legal advice. The Nylas primitives below cover the mail held in the mailbox. Any derived copy you made — rows in your own database, lines in your application logs, a vector store you embedded the message into — is yours to purge separately. The API can delete the message; it can't reach into your Postgres. Keep that in mind throughout.
