When People Email Your Agent

Anyone can email {username}@me.zinley.com, or reply to an email your agent sent. What that mail is allowed to make your agent do depends entirely on who sent it.

An email thread where a third party wrote to the agent's address and Zinley replied on the owner's behalf.
Someone emails your agent — Zinley answers within the rules you set.

Everyone can write — not everyone can command

Zinley doesn't slam the door on unknown senders. It reads the mail, then decides how much authority the sender has. There are four tiers:

Tier Who they are What they can do
You (owner) Mail from your verified account address Everything. Email is a full remote control for your agent.
Trusted Addresses you added on Trusted & blocked Same as you — full control by email.
Thread participant Someone you pulled into a thread by CC'ing your agent alongside them Can work with the agent inside that thread — no access to your wider account.
Stranger Cold first contact, or anyone who isn't the above Most cautious mode: your agent can talk, but stays guarded and won't act on your behalf.

Two details worth knowing:

  • Strangers don't promote themselves. Someone who emails your agent directly stays a stranger no matter how many times they write back. Only you pull people up a tier — by CC'ing them into a thread, or by adding them as trusted.
  • Colleagues get the benefit of the doubt. If your agent is already talking to yohei@somefirm.com and maggie@somefirm.com joins the thread, Zinley treats her as a participant rather than a cold stranger.

It answers them — and briefs you

Here's the part that surprises people. When a stranger writes something that actually concerns you — a job applicant, a customer, someone asking for a meeting — Zinley does two things at once:

  1. It answers the sender — politely, usefully, and without overcommitting. In the screenshot above, a candidate asked for a job description and an intro call; Zinley thanked them, said it would check with the team, and promised a follow-up. No ghosting, no fake promises.
  2. It emails you a heads-up — a separate message in your inbox with the gist ("Candidate inquiry: Backend Engineer role — need your call") so the decision lands with you, not in a pile of unread mail.

The stranger gets a professional first response in minutes; you get a one-line decision to make instead of a thread to read. That's the whole idea.

The one-time bounce for strangers

If a stranger replies to an email your agent sent — a broadcast, a notification, an introduction — they get one short, polite note back explaining that this address isn't monitored for replies and pointing them to the right way to reach you. Their message doesn't reach the agent.

  • The bounce is rate-limited to once per sender per 24 hours, so nobody gets caught in a reply loop.
  • It threads into the existing conversation in their mail client rather than landing as a fresh, confusing message.
  • It's also the recovery path for you: if you reply from a mailbox Zinley doesn't recognize yet, the bounce tells you how to add that address as trusted.

Blocked senders get no bounce at all. That's deliberate — see Trusted & blocked.

Attachments

Your agent can read what people send it.

  • Up to 20 files per email, 25 MB each.
  • Images, PDFs, documents, audio — all readable. Your agent can look at a screenshot, quote a contract, or summarize a deck.
  • Executables are dropped silently — .exe, .msi, .bat, .sh, .cmd, .ps1, .scr, .vbs, and friends never make it in.
  • If a file is rejected or oversized, your agent notices the gap and tells the sender what happened rather than pretending it read the file.

Very large images (over ~5 MB) can't be examined in detail — Zinley will ask the sender for a smaller version or a description of the part that matters.

Reply "STOP" to pause for 24 hours

Send an email whose entire body is STOP (or UNSUBSCRIBE) and Zinley stops handling inbound email for your account for 24 hours, then resumes on its own. Case doesn't matter, and a trailing period is fine.

  • It has to be the whole message. "Please stop sending these" is read as a normal sentence, not a kill switch.
  • Mail that arrives while paused is dropped, not queued.
  • For a permanent change, set email replies to Never auto-reply in Email settings instead.

Where the mail shows up

Every thread your agent takes part in lands in the Emails tracker — subject, participants, the full transcript of what was actually sent, and an AI summary. Inbound mail also feeds your People profiles and Topics, and shows up in the next Daily brief.

Outward-facing replies wait for you by default. Decision autonomy starts at confirm, which means your agent proposes the send and you approve it. Switch it to auto in Agent setup if you'd rather it just go.

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