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When an email agent answers, it threads the reply into the right conversation, decides which addresses to CC, and decides whether to reply at all. This page explains those three behaviors and the configuration that controls them. For the settings themselves, see Configuring an email agent.

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How replies thread

Threading uses standard RFC message headers, not subject matching.
  • Every outbound email carries a Message-ID header. When a recipient replies, their mail client echoes that ID in In-Reply-To and References.
  • On each inbound email, Anyreach collects the IDs from In-Reply-To and References and looks for an existing conversation whose stored message IDs match.
  • If a match is found, the inbound email threads onto that existing EMAIL conversation. If there is no match, a new EMAIL conversation is created and seeded from the inbound message.
The conversation tracks the latest inbound Message-ID and a growing References chain so that the agent’s next reply sets In-Reply-To and References correctly and the recipient’s mail client keeps everything in one thread.
Threading is keyed on message IDs, so a reply with a changed subject line still threads correctly, and two unrelated emails that happen to share a subject do not get merged.

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Reply-all CC audience

When the agent replies, it replies to the sender and CCs the rest of the thread, mirroring a reply-all. The CC list is computed from the latest inbound message’s To and Cc recipients, then filtered: The dropped automated mailboxes are matched on their local-part, including no-reply, noreply, do-not-reply, donotreply, mailer-daemon, postmaster, bounce, and bounces (with common spelling variants).

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When the agent will not reply

Several checks can suppress a reply. The conversation and inbound message are always recorded either way; only the outbound reply is skipped. Each skip records a reason that is surfaced in the conversation detail view.
The sender-identity check looks only at the From header, not Reply-To. A human whose mail carries a Reply-To pointing at a platform agent (common with mailing lists and help-desk forwarders) still receives a reply.

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CC-only handling

When the agent is only CC’d on a message, cc_reply_policy decides what happens: When the agent is a direct To recipient, the CC policy does not apply and the reply gate still runs.

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Closing the conversation

The reply gate also reports whether the conversation is complete. When auto_close_on_conclusion is on (the default), a complete conversation is closed proactively instead of waiting for the idle timeout. The system is conservative: any uncertainty defaults to replying and not closing.

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Quoted history

Inbound email bodies are trimmed before the agent reads them. Anyreach splits off quoted reply history and signatures, keeping only the new top-post content. Quote markers it recognizes include On ... wrote: attribution lines, ----- Original Message -----, leading From: headers, and any line beginning with >. On the outbound side, quote_history controls whether prior history is quoted back beneath the reply: With quote_history off (the default), the reply contains only the agent’s response and is not padded with the prior thread.

Configuring an email agent

Set cc_reply_policy, require_dmarc_pass, quote_history, and the rest of the email channel properties.

Conversation detail

See the recorded reply decision and reason for each inbound turn.