How it works
Every agent automatically gets its own email address (e.g.,myagent.myteam@agent.abundly.ai). The agent uses this as its own identity—it doesn’t access your email account or send emails on your behalf (unless you enable a capability to access your email account).
- Send Email — Allows the agent to send emails from its address
- Receive Email — Triggers the agent when emails arrive at its address
Handling incoming messages
When the agent receives an email or SMS, it needs instructions on what to do—otherwise it will likely ignore it. Add guidance in your agent’s instructions. Agents don’t store incoming messages automatically—there’s no built-in mailbox. Each incoming message triggers the agent, which processes it according to your instructions. If you want to keep a record of emails or sms messages, ask the agent to store them (for example in a database)Example use cases
Sending emails:- “Every Friday, email me a summary of this week’s completed tasks”
- “Email the sales team whenever a new lead comes in, and attach a PDF summary of the company research”
- “When you receive an email with an invoice, extract the details, validate against our vendor list, and add to the invoice database”
- “When you receive a support email, check the knowledgebase and reply if the answer is clear. Otherwise, forward to support@company.com”
- “Store all incoming emails in a database. Create the database if it doesn’t exist.”
- “Log all outgoing emails with recipient, subject, and timestamp”
- “Send a text reminder to all attendees 24 hours before their appointment”
- “Text me if a critical alert comes in after hours”
What agents can do with email
Agents can handle email much like a human would:- Attachments — Read incoming attachments (PDFs, images, documents) and add attachments to outgoing emails
- CC and BCC — Include additional recipients
- Reply and forward — Respond to threads or forward to others
- Rich formatting — Send nice-looking HTML emails with embedded images and formatting
Guardrails and approval
Giving an agent the ability to email externally is powerful—but it also requires care. You can configure guardrails to limit what the agent can do with email:
Email whitelist
Restrict which addresses the agent can contact:- Allow only specific domains (e.g.,
@yourcompany.com) - Allow only specific addresses
- Or leave unrestricted (agent can email anyone)
Approval requirements
Control when human approval is required:| Setting | Behavior |
|---|---|
| Always | Every email requires your approval |
| Never | Agent sends without asking |
| Not on whitelist | Approval required only for addresses outside the whitelist |
- In a chat context, approval requests show up as a widget in the chat.
- When responding to triggers, approval requests show up in the Diary & Approvals tab.
SMS
Agents can send and receive text messages for time-sensitive communication.SMS capabilities are currently hidden. Contact support@abundly.ai to enable them for your account.
- Send SMS — Agent can send text messages
- Receive SMS — Agent is triggered by incoming texts (requires a dedicated phone number)
Using your own email domain
By default, emails come from@agent.abundly.ai. If you need emails to come from your own domain, you can configure an external email provider in the advanced settings section of the Send Email capability card.
Security considerations
Email and SMS give your agent the ability to contact people outside the platform. Before enabling these capabilities, consider:- What data can the agent access? If it has access to sensitive information, be careful about who it can contact.
- What are the consequences of a mistake? An agent emailing the wrong person or sending incorrect information could cause problems.
- What guardrails are appropriate? Start restrictive (whitelist + approval) and loosen as you gain confidence.