Why an AI agent needs its own inbox, not a shared mailbox

说明与用途

为每个 AI 代理分配独立邮箱，避免重复回复并将读取状态保留在服务器端。

问题

Agents sharing a mailbox can mark each other’s messages as read, causing duplicate replies and loss of message state.

结果

Dedicated inboxes per agent eliminate duplicate replies, preserve threading, and simplify cleanup.

工作流

• Assign a unique email address to each agent.
• Configure the agent to fetch only unread messages for its address.
• Process messages and reply, letting the server mark them as read.
• If the agent crashes, the message remains unread for retry.
• Delete the agent’s mailbox when the agent is removed.
• Use stable message IDs to deduplicate across restarts and workers.

证据

Most teams wiring an agent into email give it the same mailbox the humans use.

来源

The fix is boring and structural: give every agent its own address.

来源

Store the message id, not the sequence number. Sequence numbers shift when a message is expunged; a stable id lets the agent deduplicate across restarts and across two workers running the same job.

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