Give your AI agent a real email address on your own domain

Most "AI agent that emails for you" demos point a language model at a human's Gmail inbox over OAuth. That works until the agent needs its own identity: an address people reply to, a calendar that accepts invites, a mailbox your application owns end to end. Borrowing a human's inbox means inheriting their OAuth scopes, their rate limits, and the awkwardness of an agent sending mail as a person who didn't write it. A Nylas Agent Account flips that around. It's a real name@yourcompany.com mailbox that you create and control entirely through the API — it sends, receives, hosts calendar events, and RSVPs, and it's indistinguishable from a human-operated account to anyone on the other end. Under the hood it's just a grant , so the grant_id you get back works with the same grant-scoped endpoints — Messages, Threads, Folders, Drafts, Attachments, Contacts, Calendars, and Events — you've already used for connected accounts, plus the standard webhook triggers. This post is a working tour of provisioning one, from two angles: the HTTP API for your backend, and the Nylas CLI for the terminal and quick experiments. I work on the CLI, so the terminal commands below are the exact ones I reach for. Why an Agent Account beats borrowing a human inbox An Agent Account is a first-class sender, not a delegated one. When the agent owns support@yourcompany.com , people reply to it directly, calendars invite it as a normal participant, and its mail authenticates as coming from you. A few concrete differences from pointing an agent at someone's existing mailbox: No OAuth flow to babysit. Creation needs only an email address on a domain you've registered — there's no refresh token to store or rotate, and the grant rarely expires because there's no OAuth token to refresh. Its own reputation. The account sends on your domain, and a new domain establishes its sender reputation over roughly four weeks of gradual sending. That reputation is yours to protect, not a shared corporate inbox's. Per-t