Configure Curia's email channel with Nylas integration

Configure Nylas to give Curia a dedicated email account for sending and receiving, and optionally monitor your own inbox in observation mode.

Curia’s email channel is powered by Nylas — a unified API that handles the OAuth and IMAP/SMTP complexity across Gmail, Outlook, and other providers. Once connected, Curia can send emails on your behalf, draft replies for your review, read your inbox, and triage incoming messages automatically.

Single account setup

The quickest way to get email working is to connect one account using three environment variables.

1. Create a Nylas account

   Sign up at app.nylas.com. The free tier is sufficient for development and small deployments.

2. Create an application

   In the Nylas dashboard, create a new application and choose Email as the product. Once created, copy your API key — this becomes NYLAS_API_KEY.

3. Connect an email account

   Inside your application, go to Grants and add a new grant. This walks you through an OAuth flow to connect a Gmail, Outlook, or other email account to Nylas. After completing the flow, copy the Grant ID — this becomes NYLAS_GRANT_ID.

   Use a dedicated email address for Curia (e.g., [e-mail]) rather than your primary inbox. Curia will read and process all incoming messages on this account.

4. Set your environment variables

   Open your .env file and fill in all three values:

   NYLAS_API_KEY=nyk_v0_...
   NYLAS_GRANT_ID=<grant-id-from-dashboard>
   NYLAS_SELF_EMAIL=[e-mail]
   

   NYLAS_SELF_EMAIL is the address of the connected account. Curia uses it to filter self-sent messages and sign outbound emails.

5. Restart Curia

   pnpm local
   

   The email channel activates automatically when all three Nylas variables are present. You should see the email adapter initialize in the log output.

Multiple email accounts

For more advanced deployments — for example, a dedicated Curia account that sends directly and the CEO’s personal account that requires draft review — configure named accounts in config/local.yaml using the channel_accounts.email block.

# config/local.yaml
channel_accounts:
  email:
    curia:
      nylas_grant_id: "env:NYLAS_GRANT_ID_CURIA"
      self_email:     "env:NYLAS_SELF_EMAIL_CURIA"
      outbound_policy: direct

    personal:
      nylas_grant_id: "env:NYLAS_GRANT_ID_PERSONAL"
      self_email:     "env:NYLAS_SELF_EMAIL_PERSONAL"
      outbound_policy: autonomy_gated
      autonomy_threshold: 80

Each key (curia, personal) becomes an account name that you pass to email skills via the account parameter.

Outbound policies

Every account has an outbound_policy that controls how Curia handles replies and new messages from that account:

Policy	What happens
direct	Curia sends immediately. Blocked-contact and content filters still apply.
draft_gate	Curia saves a Nylas draft for your review. You send it from your email client.
autonomy_gated	Curia checks its global autonomy score. Above autonomy_threshold, it sends directly. Below, it falls back to draft_gate.

When using channel_accounts.email, the single-account env vars (NYLAS_API_KEY, NYLAS_GRANT_ID, NYLAS_SELF_EMAIL) are no longer used. All accounts must be defined in the YAML block. You still need NYLAS_API_KEY in your environment — it’s the application-level key shared by all accounts.

Observation mode

Curia can monitor the CEO’s inbox in addition to its own. In observation mode, Curia reads incoming messages addressed to the CEO and silently triages them — it does not act as the intended recipient or respond as itself.

When a message arrives in observation mode, Curia classifies it into one of five categories and takes the appropriate action:

Category	What Curia does
URGENT	Notifies you immediately on a high-trust channel (e.g., Signal). Does not reply to the sender.
ACTIONABLE	Takes action using available skills — calendar updates, contact lookups, etc. No notification sent.
NEEDS DRAFT	Saves a draft reply (in your voice) to the CEO’s account for your review. Does not send.
LEAVE FOR CEO	Takes no action. No archive, no draft, no notification. You handle it yourself.
NOISE	Archives the message. No notification.

When in doubt, Curia defaults to LEAVE FOR CEO rather than acting. URGENT is reserved for genuinely time-sensitive items.

Email skills

Once the email channel is active, the following skills become available to Curia and any agents you configure:

Skill	What it does
email-list	List recent messages in any connected account
email-get	Fetch the full body of a specific message by ID
email-send	Compose and send a new email
email-reply	Reply to an existing thread by message ID
email-draft-save	Save a draft to a specified account for human review
email-archive	Archive a message by ID

All email skills accept an account parameter to target a specific named account. Omit it to use Curia’s own account.

Troubleshooting

Email channel not activating

All three Nylas variables must be present. If any are missing, the channel disables itself at startup with one of these log messages:

NYLAS_API_KEY/NYLAS_GRANT_ID not set — email channel disabled
NYLAS_SELF_EMAIL not set — email adapter disabled

Check your .env file and restart Curia.

Messages not appearing

Curia polls the Nylas Messages API every 30 seconds by default. If messages are slow to appear, confirm the email account’s OAuth grant is active in the Nylas dashboard and that the grant ID matches NYLAS_GRANT_ID.

You can also adjust the polling interval:

NYLAS_POLL_INTERVAL_MS=15000

Outbound emails going to drafts unexpectedly

If you configured autonomy_gated as your outbound policy, check your current autonomy score. Curia sends directly only when the score is at or above autonomy_threshold. Ask Curia its current score (“What is your autonomy score?”) and raise it if needed.