A sales inbox agent should read the mail headers before the words

Sales Agent's IMAP poller now treats a delivery-status report, a temporary failure and an Auto-Submitted header as signals, so bounces hit the right prospect.

Tools and projects · 1 min read · Source
sales-agentemailengineering

Sales Agent's reply triage began as keyword rules, and keyword rules read agent-written replies right only 66 to 83% of the time. Two kinds of mail need no guessing, because the mail system labels them.

  • A delivery-status report (RFC 3464) says Status: 5.x.x for a permanent failure and 4.x.x or Action: delayed for a temporary one, and Final-Recipient names the address that failed. Before, a bounce came from mailer-daemon, so the agent could not say whose address was bad. Now the right prospect is marked bounced, and a delayed message only pauses.
  • Auto-Submitted: auto-replied (RFC 3834) or X-Autoreply marks an auto-responder, so "I am back on 2 November" pauses the cadence until then.

Everything still only reduces contact. The tests use hand-built messages, not a real server's output, and the README says so. Code: ventures/sales-agent/self-host/imap.mjs and engine.mjs.

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