AI Agent Email: Keep Untrusted Messages Inside Clear Boundaries
Design an email assistant around read-only access, explicit authority, reviewable drafts, and recovery steps so incoming messages cannot quietly expand its role.
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Chat Bot Virtual Email Box
A chat bot virtual email box gives a person a conversational way to ask about selected mail or prepare a response. The interface should make the underlying message context visible enough to check. Someone asking “draft a reply to this” needs to know which thread, sender identity, recipients, and attachments the assistant understood. Focus on a review experience that helps the person decide, correct, and continue without turning a short conversation into hidden permission for unrelated mailbox actions.
Make the selected context visible
Show the mailbox identity and the selected conversation before answering a question about it. For summaries, point back to the relevant messages or excerpts within the authorized interface so the user can inspect the basis of the answer. Distinguish an explicit statement in the email from an interpretation or an unresolved ambiguity. If the request could refer to several threads, ask a short clarifying question with recognizable choices. Guessing the intended conversation creates avoidable work even when the generated prose is otherwise fluent and useful.
Build a complete draft review
Present a proposed reply with its sender address, recipients, subject, message body, and attachments. Let the person edit the proposal while preserving a clear distinction between an unsent draft and a completed send. Check requests such as replying to everyone or adding an attachment against the actual proposal. If the person changes the audience, review whether the included content still fits that audience. A compact but complete review surface should help the user understand exactly what will be shared before choosing to send.
Support corrections without losing context
Make common corrections easy to express: shorten the draft, remove an unsupported statement, use a different tone, or leave a question unanswered. Preserve the source thread while revising so the assistant does not substitute imagined context. When a requested detail is missing, offer a draft that asks for it rather than filling the gap. Test the interface with a person who did not build it. Observe whether they can tell what is selected, what remains uncertain, what has changed, and what action has actually completed.
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Detailed examples and practical tradeoffs for the decisions behind this guide.
LLM Email Triage: Design Labels, Reviews, and Recovery
Create a practical LLM triage system with a small label set, structured results, realistic evaluation cases, a manageable review queue, and reversible changes.
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