Require human approval before your agent sends email

Most "AI email agent" demos end with a triumphant send . The model writes a reply, the code POSTs it, and a real message lands in a real stranger's inbox. That's a great demo and a terrible production default. The moment your agent can send mail with nobody watching, you've handed an LLM a corporate email address and the standing authority to use it. One hallucinated price, one confidently wrong refund promise, one apology to the wrong customer, and you're explaining to legal why a bot signed an email as your company. There's a boring, durable fix that predates AI by decades: don't send — draft. Stage the message, put a human in front of it, and only send once someone with a name and a pulse approves. Email systems have had a "Drafts" folder forever for exactly this reason. The Nylas Drafts API turns that folder into something better — an approval queue your agent writes into and your reviewers drain. This post builds that queue. The agent creates a draft, a human reviews the pending drafts, and an approved draft gets sent byte-for-byte unchanged . No re-rendering, no "the agent regenerates it on approval" race where the thing you approved isn't the thing that ships. I work on the Nylas CLI, so the terminal commands below are the exact ones I reach for, and I'll pair every one with the raw curl so you can wire it into a backend in whatever language you like. This is deliberately not about escalating inbound threads to a human (that's a different problem, where the trigger is a message arriving). Here the trigger is the agent wanting to send , and the gate sits on the outbound path. Why a draft is the right approval primitive You could build approval a dozen ways. You could buffer the agent's output in a queue table and call send later. You could stash a JSON blob in Redis. Both work, and both quietly reinvent something the email stack already gives you. A draft is a real, persisted email object , on the mailbox, with a stable id . That buys you three things a homegr