Turn emails into agent tasks, not todos.
Email-to-task tools convert messages into cards a human still has to move. On a2a cloud, each email conversation becomes a durable agent thread: mail to <agent-name>@agents.a2acloud.io starts a governed run, follow-ups on the same References chain join the same thread, and the reply lands back in the sender's inbox in seconds. The inbox stops being a queue a human drains.
one conversation = one thread · agent does the work · audit event per message
Email-to-task tools just relocate the backlog.
Every email-to-task pipeline ends the same way: the message becomes a card, the card joins a queue, and a person still drains the queue. The conversion loses the conversation — follow-ups spawn duplicate tickets, attachments become links back into the mailbox, and the requester never sees progress without being CC'd on tracker noise. The bottleneck was never where the task was written down. It was that a human had to do every task.
Make the conversation the unit of work.
On a2a cloud an email doesn't become an item to triage — it becomes a thread an agent works. One conversation, one durable thread, one governed run per exchange, with the reply delivered where the requester already is: their inbox.
The conversation is the task
One email conversation — its References chain — becomes one dashboard chat thread with an email badge. The thread isn't a pointer to work someone still has to do; it's where a governed agent run actually does it.
Durable, not drained
Follow-ups on the same email thread land in the same agent thread. Inbound mail arrives as the user message, the agent's reply as the assistant message — the task accumulates context instead of resetting per email.
Forward it, done
The intake surface is an address: <agent-name>@agents.a2acloud.io. Enable it with resources.mailbox: true — one a2a.yaml line — or one dashboard click, and it's provisioned in seconds. No parser, no Zapier, no ticket form.
Attachments come along
The structured handler — @a2a.tool(on_email=True), the SDK contract shipping in the next a2a-pack release — receives sender, subject, body, message_id, date, references, and attachments inlined up to 1 MiB. The task arrives with its inputs, not links to them.
The sender stays in email
The agent's reply is sent from its own address with In-Reply-To and References set, so it threads into the sender's Gmail or Outlook conversation in seconds. The person who mailed the work never has to learn your tool to see it done.
A worked task leaves evidence
Every received and sent mail is an audit event, and the run executes under the owner's identity and LLM credentials. A task that came in by email is exactly as accountable as one started in the dashboard.
Email-to-ticket vs. email-to-agent-thread.
Frequently asked.
How does a2a cloud turn emails into tasks?
Every Pro-plan agent can have a real mailbox at <agent-name>@agents.a2acloud.io, enabled with a single a2a.yaml line (resources.mailbox: true) or one dashboard click. Each email conversation — keyed by its References chain — becomes one dashboard chat thread that an agent run actually works: inbound mail is the user message, the agent's reply is the assistant message. The email doesn't become an item on a list; it becomes a running task.
How is this different from email-to-ticket automation?
Email-to-ticket tools move the email into a queue that a human still drains. Here, the arrival is the assignment: the agent runs with the owner's identity and LLM credentials, does the work, and replies into the sender's thread in seconds. The ticket, the worker, and the paper trail collapse into one audited thread.
What happens when someone replies to the same email thread later?
The follow-up joins the same agent thread, because threads are keyed by the email's References chain. The agent sees the conversation so far rather than a context-free new task, and its next reply threads back into the same conversation in the sender's mail client. Tasks stay durable across the whole exchange instead of fragmenting per message.
Can I control which emails become tasks?
Yes — by default only the agent's owner can create work by email. To accept mail from teammates or customers you add them to an explicit allowed_senders allowlist. Auto-submitted messages and senders on the agent domain are filtered automatically, so bounce storms and bot loops don't become tasks.
Do attachments and metadata make it into the task?
Yes. The structured on_email handler — the SDK contract shipping in the next a2a-pack release — receives a typed InboundEmailPayload with sender, subject, body, message_id, date, references, and attachments inlined up to 1 MiB, and agent code can also use ctx.mail to list, read, send, and reply. The mailbox itself carries a 100 MiB quota, with 30-day retention if the plan lapses.
Is there a record that the task was actually done?
Every mail the agent receives or sends leaves an audit event, and the full conversation is a dashboard transcript with an email badge. Outbound mail is capped at 50 per agent per day — replies over the cap stay in the thread and are audited rather than silently vanishing — so the record stays complete even at the limit.
Related guides.
All guides live in the guides index.
Mail it to the agent instead.
a2a cloud deploys any agent — LangGraph, OpenAI Agents SDK, CrewAI, or custom — and gives it a real mailbox with one line of a2a.yaml. Each email conversation becomes a durable dashboard thread the agent works under its owner's identity, replies thread back into Gmail or Outlook in seconds, and every message in either direction leaves an audit event. Tasks that arrive by email and leave as finished work.