Adding email and calendar tools to an AI agent is mostly an exercise in restraint. Give it 50 commands and the agent gets confused. Give it 5 carefully-chosen ones and it punches above its weight.

After running agents against the Nylas CLI for a few months, these are the five I keep coming back to. Each gets exposed via MCP ( nylas mcp install ) so the agent can call them directly.

1. nylas email send

The most-used tool by a wide margin.

nylas email send \ --to [email protected] \ --subject "Re: budget review" \ --body "Approved. See you Friday."

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Why it ranks first: every agent task that touches the outside world eventually needs to communicate the result. A pull request shipped, an order placed, a bug filed — someone wants to know. Email is the lowest-common-denominator channel.

Agent prompt pattern that works:

When you complete a task that affects another person, send them an email summary. Use nylas email send with their address from the ticket.…