AI email agents are overhyped

12 bounces in 38 minutes. That is not an AI agent problem. That is a garbage in, garbage out problem. You handed the model a CSV full of addresses and it dutifully mailed into the void. Congratulations, you automated spam. The real lesson is boring: validate the list before you let anything near SMTP. No prompt will fix dead addresses. You need MX lookups, role account filtering, and a couple of retries with backoff. I learned this the hard way on a side project. It took one angry reply from someone who never signed up. Also, "open weights" from Muse Glimmer does not mean "safe to send." It means you can run it locally and still get a model that will happily mail a stranger because the CSV told it to. That 30B model is not a delivery platform. It is a text generator that happens to have an API key. Next time, split the workflow. Draft first, human approves, then send. Or use a staging inbox and count how many addresses actually exist. The article says 12 bounces. I want to know how many of those were never valid in the first place. That number says more about your outreach than the agent ever will.