Point an agent at an IMAP inbox and it triggers on every new message, attachments parsed and ready. Reply over SMTP with a drafted response. Support, sales, and AP workflows in one connector.
Overview
The Email connector speaks the two protocols every mailbox already supports. Inbound, it connects to your mailbox over IMAP and polls for new messages; each one is parsed into a clean payload with sender, subject, text and HTML bodies, and decoded attachments, then dispatched to your linked agents. Outbound, it connects to your SMTP server and sends whatever email your agent returns as JSON: recipient, subject, body.
Parsing email is the part nobody wants to own: MIME structures, encodings, attachment junk like tracking pixels and signature logos. The connector does that once, on both directions, so your agent works with structured fields instead of raw RFC 822 messages.
How it works
Get your mailbox credentials
Server, port, username, and password for IMAP (inbound) or SMTP (outbound). For Gmail, enable 2-factor authentication and create an App Password.
Create the connector and pick a mode
Add an Email connector from your agent's Connector Flow. Inbound (IMAP) triggers the agent on incoming mail; Outbound (SMTP) sends emails when linked agents complete their runs. Combine both for full reply loops.
Configure filters or the output format
Inbound: choose the mailbox folder to monitor and optional sender, subject, and unread-only filters. Outbound: have the agent return JSON with to, subject, and body, plus optional cc, bcc, html_body, and reply_to.
What you can build
Patterns teams ship in production. No queues, workers, or schedulers to run.
Email arrives
support@your-domain.comAgent classifies the issue, searches your help docs, and either replies with a fix or hands the thread to a human with the answer pre-drafted.
Email arrives
support@your-domain.comAgent classifies the issue, searches your help docs, and either replies with a fix or hands the thread to a human with the answer pre-drafted.
Inbound filtering and attachments
The connector monitors a mailbox folder (default INBOX) and can process unread messages only, filter by sender address or domain, filter by subject text, and mark processed emails as read. The agent payload carries from, subject, body_text, body_html, and an attachments array. Images, PDFs, text formats, and Office documents are included with their content (text as plain text, binary as base64); tracking pixels, favicons, and signature images are filtered out, and attachments over 10MB arrive as metadata only.
Every processed email becomes a normal agent run, with full traces, token and cost tracking, and the same guardrails and approval rules as any other trigger. Useful when the agent's reply goes to a real customer.
Sending mail from an agent
An outbound connector sends an email whenever a linked agent completes a run. The agent's response must be a JSON object with to, subject, and body, plus optional cc, bcc, html_body, and reply_to; an output schema keeps that shape reliable. Delivery goes through your SMTP server with TLS, credentials encrypted at rest, and automatic retry on transient failures. See the full payload formats and an example agent in the Email docs.
Information
- Publisher
- By Connic
- Category
- Connectors
- Modes
- Inbound, Outbound
- Documentation
- Email docs
Frequently Asked Questions
Can an agent reply to emails automatically?
Does it work with Gmail?
imap.gmail.com or smtp.gmail.com with an App Password: enable 2-factor authentication on the Google account, generate an app password for Mail, and use that 16-character password in the connector instead of the account password.What happens to email attachments?
Bring the event source, payload shape, result destination, and any private-network or approval requirements. We will map Email to the right Connic connector mode, deployment path, and observability setup.
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