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guide

Audit Logs for Agent Email

Agent email audit logs need to answer four questions: what email came in, what the agent understood, who or what approved the action, and what email was sent. Without that chain, support, security, and engineering cannot debug the system.

last updated 2026-05-07 4 sections
section 01

Audit log model

Store audit records around events, decisions, actions, and provider results. The log should connect inbound message IDs to extraction results, policy decisions, reviewer actions, outbound provider IDs, and final delivery events.

recordrequired fieldswhy it matters
Inbound eventprovider, message_id, mailbox, sender, received_atProves what entered the system.
Extractionintent, entities, confidence, schema_versionExplains what the agent understood.
Policy decisionrisk_level, review_required, policy_versionShows why automation was allowed or blocked.
Reviewreviewer, decision, edited_fields, decided_atProvides accountability for human gates.
Outbound sendrecipient, idempotency_key, provider_message_idConnects action to delivery trace.
section 02

Retention and privacy

Logs should be useful without keeping sensitive message content forever. Store raw payloads with retention limits, redact secrets, and separate operational metadata from message bodies where possible.

  • ok Define retention for raw payloads, extracted objects, and outbound copies separately.
  • ok Redact tokens, passwords, and payment details before long-term storage.
  • ok Keep message IDs and metadata longer than raw content when possible.
  • ok Record access to sensitive audit records.
  • ok Make deletion behavior explicit for tenant data exports and removals.
section 03

Support visibility

Support teams need a safe read-only view: inbound message, extracted intent, policy outcome, outbound message, and delivery status. They should not need production database access to answer a customer question.

support questionaudit field neededowner
Why did the agent reply?inbound event and extracted intentsupport
Who approved it?review decision and reviewersupport lead
Was it delivered?provider message ID and delivery eventsupport
Was this a duplicate?idempotency key and send ledgerengineering
section 04

Incident review

A complete audit trail makes incident review practical. The timeline should show inbound receipt, extraction, policy evaluation, review, send attempt, provider result, webhook events, and any retry or manual correction.

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