Subject: [Sml] Structured Email and AI Agents
From: Adam Sobieski <[email-masked]>
To: "[email-masked]" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 25 Aug 2025 09:35:24 +0000
List-Id: Structured Email <sml.ietf.org>

IETF SML WG,

People could create structured emails by configuring their email applications (out-of-office or on-vacation automated replies) or by simply dragging-and-dropping or pasting data into their email-authoring applications. Additionally, software systems, e.g., people's AI assistants, could create, send, and receive structured emails while performing tasks.

Example Use Case 1: A person or a mailing-list administrator wants to send a structured email, e.g., calendar event update, to contacts' AI agents. Recipient AI agents, after determining that this email was from a known contact, and was not a spam message, could notify their end-users of the calendar event update and ask them if they wanted to integrate the update into their calendars and schedules, asking at times convenient, between work tasks.

Example Use Case 2: More generally, a person's AI agent, while performing a task, wants to send a structured email to an AI agent of one of that person's contacts.

It occurs that AI agents could have their own email addresses both for sending and receiving email messages. In these regards, it could be useful to be able to simply ascertain an AI agent's email address given a person's email address. Similarly, it would be useful to be able to simply ascertain a person's end-user's email address given their AI assistant's email address.

For an example of such a simple bidirectional procedure, a special character, "/", could allow appending "ai" to an existing email address to signify that the recipient is intended to be the person's AI assistant agent.

That is, for a contact: [email-masked] , one could send a message to their AI assistant by using: bob.smith/[email-masked] .

This particular syntax pattern could be extended to allow "subdirectories". For example: bob.smith/ai/[email-masked] .

Note that bob.smith/ai/[email-masked] could, for all valid "subdirectory paths", be routed to the same inbox of an AI assistant which might, optionally, use any provided "subdirectory path" as a type of context hint, to organize received messages into folders, and/or to raise contextual events for subscribed software event handlers.

There may also be other syntax possibilities to consider (see also: https://www.jochentopf.com/email/chars.html).

Alternatively, one or more new email header fields could be used to signal that a structured email message was from a sender's AI agent and/or intended for a recipient's AI agent.

From: [email-masked]
From-Agent: assistant
To: [email-masked]
To-Agent: assistant
To-Agent-Task-Hint: calendar

In this approach, a structured email message would be sent to [email-masked] and the new special email headers would be used to indicate that it was from an AI agent of Alice Jones and intended for an AI agent of Bob Smith. This structured email message could, then, be automatically organized into a secondary inbox folder and marked as read when processed by the recipient's AI assistant agent, this processing potentially making use of both natural language and structured data content.

Thank you. Any thoughts on these ideas and considered approaches?

Best regards,
Adam Sobieski