[Sml] Re: Structured Email and AI Agents

[Adam Sobieski <[e-mail]>]

Michael,

That is a good point on additional use cases for human assistants and secretaries.

Earlier, was looking at:

From: <[e-mail]>
From-Agent: assistant
To: <[e-mail]>
To-Agent: assistant
To-Agent-Task-Hint: calendar
Subject: ...

Now, considering that humans might also want to use these new headers, perhaps something like:

From: <[e-mail]>
Reply-To-Attention: ...
To: <[e-mail]>
Attention: ...
Subject: ...

Brainstorming, "attention", or "ATTN:", on an envelope, package, or at the top of a letter, indicates who the mail is for. It is often used when mailing something to a place other than the person’s home address, for example their place of work, so that other people don’t open it.

So, maybe this existing "attention" concept could be useful for the topics at hand. An Attention email header could be used to address either a person, AI agent, or person or AI agent by role, who might not be the primarily addressed entity or organization at an email address.

Any thoughts on these approaches towards new headers or on any other approaches?


Best regards,
Adam
________________________________
From: Michael Richardson <[e-mail]>
Sent: Tuesday, August 26, 2025 3:59 PM
To: [e-mail] <[e-mail]>
Subject: [Sml] Re: Structured Email and AI Agents


John R Levine <[e-mail]> wrote:
    >> As considered, for email addresses shared between end-users and their
    >> AI agents, end-users wouldn't tend to want to receive notification
    >> chimes when their AI agents received email messages, but they would
    >> tend to want to continue to receive such notification chimes for those
    >> email messages intended for them instead. Similarly, end-users would
    >> tend to want special folders for their AI agents' messages to be
    >> automatically sorted into.

    > If the agent can't sort the mail and tell your mail program to skip the
    > notifications for mail it's already handled, I'd look for a better
    > agent and/or mail program.

Yes.
But, in order for me to be able to shop around for agents, independent of my
mail service provider, I think we need some conventions for that interaction.
The protocol side of things is probably IMAP+SUBMISSION, yes... but I think
we need more.

    > If you need special stuff in the message to tell the recipient MTA how
    > to handle it, that's not AI or an agent, that's just ordinary mail
    > sorting which we do today.

Yes, certainly.
It shouldn't need extensions to mail sorting, just conventions on what we
sort on.

    >> P.S.: Moments ago, while exploring Sieve's RFC's [1], I found mention
    >> of a "+" syntax in RFC 5233 ( https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5233 )

    > It's entirely up to the mailbox owner if they want to use subaddresses
    > and what syntax they use.  The plus sign is a somewhat common
    > convention but it is not universal.  Some systems use other characters
    > for subaddresses, some don't have subaddresses at all.  As that RFC
    > says:

I'm also reluctant to use the + convention here.
I think that a new header should be fine.
Perhaps we need one to say this was created by an agent, and one to direct
responses to a specific agent.   And of course, I should be able to "fake" it
all, using artificial artificial intelligence, aka, my actual human secretary :-)

--
Michael Richardson <[e-mail]>   . o O ( IPv6 IøT consulting )
           Sandelman Software Works Inc, Ottawa and Worldwide