How I Built a Business Email Agent with Compliance Controls in Go

Every few weeks another AI agent product launches that can "handle your email." Dispatch, OpenClaw, and a dozen others promise to read, summarize, and reply on your behalf. They work fine for personal use. But the moment you try to use them for business operations, three problems show up: No spending controls. The agent calls an LLM as many times as it wants. You find out what it cost at the end of the month. No approval flow. It either sends emails autonomously or it doesn't. There's no "show me the draft, let me approve it" step. No audit trail. If a client asks "why did your system send me this?", you have no answer. I needed an email agent for my consulting business that could triage inbound mail, draft replies, and digest threads. But I also needed to explain every action it took to a client if asked. So I built one. The core constraint: AI never executes The first decision was architectural. In most agent frameworks, the LLM decides what to do and does it. Tool calling, function