Email for your agents
Build the agent once. Email is one way in.
Cotera agents are reusable. The same agent your team talks to in Slack can run on a schedule, fire from a webhook, or take an email address of its own. Forward it something and it goes to work — no second agent to build.
Included with every Cotera workspace. No inbox to build, no polling.
What the agent reaches for once the mail lands
One agent, many surfaces
You are not building an email bot. You are reusing an agent.
Most platforms make you rebuild the automation for every channel it needs to run in. On Cotera the agent is the unit, and Slack, email, schedules, and webhooks are all ways of getting to it.
The agent is the thing you build
Describe it once: what it does, which tools it may use, what it should never touch. Slack, email, schedules, and webhooks are ways to reach that agent, not four separate builds.
Email is simply another door
Give the agent your team already uses in Slack an address as well, and it is the same agent behind both — same tools, same instructions, same memory of what it has done before.
This door opens outside your walls
Customers, vendors, candidates, and partners cannot post in your Slack or call your API. They can email. It is the one surface that works for people who will never have a login.
Capabilities
An address in front of the whole platform.
An email trigger is not a mailbox to poll. It is one more door onto the same agents, the same 100+ tool integrations, and the same durable execution engine the rest of Cotera runs on.
Give an existing agent an address
Add an email trigger to an agent you already have and Cotera mints the address: deals-k3f9x2@inbound.cotera.ai. The random suffix is deliberate — inbound mail carries no signature, so the address is the credential, and an unguessable one keeps strangers from starting your runs.
The message is the input
Every run is handed a normalized payload: sender, recipients, subject, plain-text and HTML bodies, message ID, attachment names, and the SPF, DKIM, and spam-score results. Bind any field into any node downstream.
Forward, CC, or BCC it
Recipients are read from the SMTP envelope, not the visible To: header, so a BCC still fires. Put two agents on one thread and both runs start from the same message.
One message, one run
The Message-ID is the idempotency key. A retried delivery does not queue a second run, so a flaky hop upstream never means two deals, two tickets, or two replies.
Answer wherever the work belongs
The agent that read the email does not have to reply by email. It can enrich the sender, query the warehouse, write the CRM record, post the result to Slack, and answer on the thread — whichever combination the job calls for.
Test before you hand it out
Fire a sample email.received payload from the editor and watch the run end to end. Get the bindings right before the address reaches a customer, a vendor, or the rest of your team.
Send it something
One forward. A whole run.
Five things teams forward to an agent every day, and the nodes each one sets off.
Arrives
from Priya Raman <priya@northwindlabs.com>
to deals-k3f9x2@inbound.cotera.ai
Interested in a demo
We’re a 60-person logistics team looking at replacing our current stack this quarter.
Runs
The payload
What the agent actually sees.
Cotera normalizes the delivery before your workflow ever touches it, so every run binds against the same fields whether the sender wrote plain text, rich HTML, or forwarded a thread six replies deep.
{
"matchedAddress": "deals-k3f9x2@inbound.cotera.ai",
"from": "Priya Raman <priya@northwindlabs.com>",
"to": "deals-k3f9x2@inbound.cotera.ai",
"cc": "",
"subject": "Interested in a demo",
"text": "We're a 60-person logistics team looking at\nreplacing our current stack this quarter.",
"html": "<p>We're a 60-person logistics team…</p>",
"messageId": "<CAF7a2ab@mail.northwindlabs.com>",
"spf": "pass",
"dkim": "{@northwindlabs.com : pass}",
"spamScore": "0.1",
"attachments": []
}from
Who sent it — enrich them, look them up in the CRM, decide if they matter.
to · cc · matchedAddress
Which of your addresses this landed on, when a workflow owns more than one.
subject
Usually the intent. Route on it, classify it, use it as the ticket title.
text · html
The body, both ways, whether the sender wrote plain text or rich mail.
attachments
The filenames that came with it — enough to branch on what was sent.
spf · dkim · spamScore
The authentication results, so you can refuse to act on mail that failed them.
messageId
The idempotency key. Also how you thread a reply back onto the original.
Ready-made agents
Put an address on an agent that already works.
Every agent in the library takes an email trigger, on top of whatever else it already runs on. These three are the ones teams reach for first, because forwarding is already what they were doing by hand.
How it works
Three steps to an agent you can email.
Start with an agent
A new one you describe in plain English, or one your team already uses in Slack. Nothing about it needs to change to make it reachable by email.
Add an email trigger
Click Add trigger, choose Email. Cotera mints the address from the trigger name and shows it on the trigger card, ready to copy.
Send it something
Mail it, forward a thread, CC it on one, or set an inbox rule so anything matching a filter reaches it automatically. The agent reads the message and gets to work.
The same agent is reachable other ways too. Coco for Slack puts it in a conversation, and schedules and webhooks start it without anyone asking. Adding one surface never means rebuilding the agent behind it.
Agents are powered by large language models and may occasionally produce inaccurate responses. Always verify important information before acting on it. Cotera does not use the email you send to a trigger to train AI models. Messages are processed within your Cotera organization and are subject to Cotera's privacy policy.
WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?
Ready to build?
Stop duct-taping tools.
Stop writing playbooks no one follows.
Start building agents that actually do the work—and do it well.
Cotera: For people who think busywork is boring.
"This is the best product ever when it comes to shipping. Ten on ten recommended. I just can't wait to see what happens with this product."
Rebecca Blount
Director, Customer Success