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Agents can communicate through email and SMS. Email works out of the box—just enable the capabilities and go. For SMS, you need to contact support@abundly.ai (for now).

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How it works

Every agent automatically gets its own email address (e.g., myagent.myworkspace@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).
Email capabilities showing Send Email and Receive Email toggles
Email capabilities:
  • Send Email — Allows the agent to send emails from its address
  • Receive Email — Triggers the agent when emails arrive at its address
No configuration required. Just toggle the capabilities on in Settings → Capabilities.
You can customize the first part of the agent’s email address in the agent settings, under Main Settings -> Communication.

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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. By default there is no mailbox layer—each incoming message triggers the agent, which processes it according to your instructions. The platform also keeps a copy of every sent and received email and SMS so you can review them in the UI (see Activity monitoring); message logging can be paused per agent from that tab. You can also ask the agent to keep its own record (for example in a database)
If you have an email-based workflow, it’s often faster to test it in the chat first. Ask the agent to simulate receiving an email: “Process this as if you received it by email, but don’t actually send anything—just tell me what you would do.”

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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”
Processing incoming emails:
  • “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”
Logging messages:
  • “Store all incoming emails in a database. Create the database if it doesn’t exist.”
  • “Log all outgoing emails with recipient, subject, and timestamp”
SMS:
  • “Send a text reminder to all attendees 24 hours before their appointment”
  • “Text me if a critical alert comes in after hours”

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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

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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:
Send Email capability settings showing allowed recipients and approval options
Send Email settings live inline in the capability drawer and include a plain-English summary of how the agent will behave with the current configuration.

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Allowed recipients

Turn on Restrict who the agent can email to limit who the agent can contact. The allowed list mixes two kinds of entries:
  • Specific addresses — individual inboxes, e.g. name@example.com
  • Whole domains — written as @example.com, matches anyone at that domain
The first time Send Email is enabled, the agent’s owner is pre-seeded as the only entry on the allowed list, so the agent is locked down to that one address until you broaden it.

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Approval

When the agent is restricted, you choose what happens for recipients inside and outside the allowed list independently:
RecipientOptions
Inside the listSend the email, or ask for your approval
Outside the listBlock the email, or ask for your approval
By default the agent sends to allowed recipients without asking and blocks everything else. Switch the outside-list rule to “Ask for my approval” if you’d rather review unknown recipients than block them outright. Switch the inside-list rule to “Ask for my approval” if you want a human in the loop even for known contacts. When restriction is off, you instead get a single “Ask before every email” toggle — useful when you want broad reach but a human in the loop on every send.
  • In a chat context, approval requests show up as a widget in the chat.
  • When responding to triggers, approval requests show up in the Activity tab.
Each approval card has a Notify agent checkbox next to the action buttons. Tick it before approving or rejecting to tell the agent about your decision so it can take follow-up steps; leave it unchecked and the action just executes (or doesn’t) without the agent learning the outcome. Inside a chat the checkbox is hidden — the agent is always notified there so the conversation can continue.
Email approval request widget in the chat
See Guardrails for more on configuring these controls.

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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.
SMS works similarly to email:
  • Send SMS — Agent can send text messages
  • Receive SMS — Agent is triggered by incoming texts (requires a dedicated phone number)
The same guardrails apply—you can restrict the agent to an allow-list of phone numbers and configure inside-list and outside-list approval rules.

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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 (allowed list + approval for anyone not on it) and loosen as you gain confidence.
The platform includes multiple layers of protection—see Security overview for details on how agents are monitored and constrained. But ultimately, you decide which capabilities, instructions, and guardrails to configure.