Keep your agent's mail out of spam traps

Spam traps are the failure mode nobody puts in the demo. A bounce is loud — you get a 5.x.x back, your code logs it, you move on. A complaint at least gives you a webhook. A spam trap gives you nothing . The message gets accepted, no error comes back, and somewhere a mailbox provider quietly writes your domain down as a spammer. By the time you notice, your inbox placement has already cratered and you have no single bounce to point at. That's the trap, literally. And it's the one that bites autonomous agents the hardest, because the whole appeal of an agent is that it acts without a human watching every send. Point a model at a list it scraped, let it loop, and it'll happily mail a recycled address that's been a trap for two years. The agent never sees a problem. You only see the aftermath in your deliverability dashboard a week later. I work on the Nylas CLI, so the terminal commands below are the exact ones I reach for when I'm wiring up an Agent Account to not do this. The good news is that an Agent Account is just a grant — a grant_id that works with every grant-scoped endpoint you already know — so there's nothing new to learn on the data plane. The defense is mostly discipline: validate before you send, honor every complaint, and age out the addresses that never wanted to hear from you. What a spam trap actually is, and why it's not a bounce It's worth being precise here, because the three things people lump together behave completely differently. A bounce is a rejected delivery. The receiving server tells you the address is bad, you get a message.bounced event, and you stop. Bounce handling is a solved problem — you listen, you suppress, you're done. A complaint is a recipient hitting "report spam." The mailbox provider relays that back as a feedback loop, and you get a message.complaint event. The address is real and reachable; the human just doesn't want your mail. If you keep mailing them, you're training the provider to filter you. A spam trap is neither.