[Sml] Re: Structured Email and AI Agents

[John R Levine <[e-mail]>]

On Mon, 26 Aug 2025, Adam Sobieski wrote:
> One example scenario for wanting to be able to contact an end-user's AI agent via email would be to request information about how to communicate with the AI agent using another protocol. "My end-user wants to schedule a meeting with members of a work team, your end-user is in the list of contacts, I propose we consult our calendar data to find alternatives, dates and times to present to our end-users. How do I coordinate with you using A2A?"

Sure, my agent sends the mail to you, your agent sees it, replies, and 
files it in the "Already Handled" folder.

> 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.

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.

R's,
John

> 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:

       NOTE: Because the encoding of detailed addresses are site and/or
       implementation specific, using the subaddress extension on foreign
       addresses (such as the envelope "from" address or originator
       header fields) may lead to inconsistent or incorrect results.