Build an Email Support Triage Agent With Its Own Inbox

Every shared support inbox eventually becomes a triage problem: 80 unread messages, no agreement on what "urgent" means, and the one person who knows which customer is about to churn is on PTO. Teams keep solving this with labels and heroics. It's a better fit for an LLM — as long as the LLM has somewhere safe to live. That's the case for giving the triage agent its own mailbox. Nylas Agent Accounts (currently in beta) are hosted mailboxes you create entirely through the API. A support@yourcompany.com Agent Account receives every inbound support email, gets six system folders out of the box ( inbox , sent , drafts , trash , junk , archive ), and exposes the same grant_id -based endpoints as any connected Gmail or Outlook account. Creating one is a single request: curl --request POST \ --url "https://api.us.nylas.com/v3/connect/custom" \ --header "Authorization: Bearer $NYLAS_API_KEY " \ --header "Content-Type: application/json" \ --data '{ "provider": "nylas", "settings": { "email": "support@yourcompany.com" } }' Save the grant_id from the response — every other call hangs off it. Four buckets beat five The classification scheme from the email triage agent recipe sorts mail into exactly four categories: Bucket Meaning Action URGENT Production incident, executive ask Draft a reply within the hour ACTION Code review, meeting follow-up Draft a reply same-day FYI Status update Leave it alone NOISE Newsletter, automated alert Archive Four is deliberate. Three loses fidelity — everything collapses into "important." Five and the model starts confusing adjacent categories. The prompt runs with temperature=0 and max_tokens=10 , and the model only sees sender + subject + a 200-character snippet, not the full body. That's enough for over 90% accuracy. Here's the prompt verbatim from the recipe: You triage email into one of four categories: URGENT — production incidents, executive requests; reply within 1 hour ACTION — code reviews, meeting follow-ups; reply same day FYI — info