Email Best Practices Skill

The Email Best Practices skill gives an AI agent the operational knowledge to build a production-ready email integration — not just how to send one message, but how to keep a sending program healthy over time. It covers authentication, compliance, deliverability, and day-to-day operations.

Use this skill alongside the MailBlastr skill: that one teaches the agent *how to call the API*, this one teaches it *what a responsible sender does*.

How to give an agent this skill

This is a reference *pattern*, not a package to install — capture the checklist below as a SKILL.md (or equivalent context file) in your repo and load it into your agent's context alongside the MailBlastr skill. The operational primitives it relies on already exist: verified domains, webhooks, and suppression lists.

What it covers

• DNS authentication — step-by-step setup of SPF, DKIM, and DMARC so receivers trust your mail. See Add a domain.
• Transactional vs. marketing design — best practices for designing effective transactional emails (receipts, resets) and marketing emails (campaigns).
• Regional compliance — guidelines for CAN-SPAM, GDPR, CASL, and other regional regulations, including required unsubscribe handling.
• Webhook event processing — patterns for handling delivery notifications, bounces, and complaints. See Webhooks.
• Suppression list management — strategies for maintaining a healthy suppression list to protect deliverability.

The deliverability checklist

The skill encodes a checklist the agent applies before and during a sending program:

1. 1
   Authenticate the domain

   Verify the sending domain and publish SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records. Send only from a verified domain — MailBlastr rejects sends from unverified from addresses.

2. 2
   Separate streams

   Keep transactional and marketing mail on distinct subdomains so a marketing reputation problem never blocks password resets.

3. 3
   Honor opt-outs

   For campaigns, MailBlastr injects a per-contact unsubscribe link and RFC 8058 List-Unsubscribe header automatically. For transactional mail, sending is sender-driven — add your own opt-out where appropriate. See Unsubscribe links.

4. 4
   Process events

   Subscribe to webhooks and react to email.bounced and email.complained events. Hard bounces and complaints auto-suppress the recipient; never re-mail a suppressed address.

5. 5
   Watch your list hygiene

   Mailing addresses that bounce or complain damages your reputation. Let the suppression list do its job rather than stripping and re-adding suppressed recipients.