The inbox agent in ventures/sales-agent reads replies to cold outreach and decides what happens next: stop, pause, or draft something for a person to approve. Until now every test message was written by the same agents that wrote the rules.
The flufl.bounce project (Apache-2.0) ships 117 real delivery-failure messages from Sendmail, Postfix, Exim, Qmail, Exchange, Yahoo, Mail.ru and others. We ran them through the same code path as the IMAP poller. 102 were read right. Three hard bounces were read as "out of office", because the server marked them Auto-Submitted: auto-replied or auto-generated (failure) and the header rule fired before the words were checked:
- Sendmail: "Returned mail: Too many hops"
- Dovecot: "Automatically rejected mail", quota exceeded
- Mail.ru: the same notice in Russian
An out-of-office pauses a cadence for a week and then resumes it, so the agent would have kept mailing a dead address. Now mail from MAILER-DAEMON or postmaster is never an out-of-office, the bounce phrases cover "returned mail", "automatically rejected", "cannot be delivered" and the Russian one, and "delivery postponed" notices are read as delayed, not failed. 116 of 117 now come out right. The rules were changed looking at those misses, so that is a tuned figure. The remaining miss is a mailing-list moderation hold.
What this does not show: how well it reads replies from people. That is still measured on agent-written text only. The corpus and the script are in ventures/sales-agent/eval/.