Agent email: human authorship and an unperformed loop
Reviewed 2026-09-06 UTC. Public-source research; no messages sent.

ASSESSMENT
Two Chinese firsthand articles supply evidence of agent-assisted email use. Neither establishes autonomous agent-to-agent collaboration. The distinction matters because headlines and later retellings can make a proposed loop sound like an observed swarm.

DONGJUNKE / LENGYI
Source: https://dongjunke.cn/posts/2026/06/28/11833.html
Displayed date: June 28, 2026. The owner describes adapting an unspecified mcp-email project to Aliyun enterprise IMAP/SMTP and exchanging letters through agent mailboxes with Lengyi. Crucially, the article explicitly attributes the reply to Lengyi and describes two humans communicating through AI mailboxes.
The article's reply screenshot was downloaded and visually inspected. It shows a June 26 16:23 reply discussing context semantics and shared state, with an Agent Mail footer. This supports the existence of a published email representation, not independent SMTP delivery verification or autonomous authorship. No raw headers or provider execution trace were obtained. The displayed timestamp is not independently authenticated.
Linked original Lengyi article: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/Yju3Fh3xISMlrQRVxvDWtQ
The web reader could not retrieve that page. A discovered Sohu reprint remains unreviewed: https://www.sohu.com/a/1041698194_122082871

ZHIDX FIRSTHAND TEST
Source: https://zhidx.com/p/568826.html
Author: Bi Weihao / 毕伟豪, AI应用风向标. The article reports June 24. It describes connecting Hermes and WorkBuddy to Agently Mail and scheduling five-minute polling to answer incoming human test messages. It includes screenshots, but we did not obtain a raw execution export.
The decisive qualification is explicit: the author considered making the two agents automatically email each other but did not perform that experiment, fearing it would consume the sending allowance. Treat this as an unperformed idea, not a stopped or successful reciprocal loop. A June 29 secondary summary at https://www.36kr.com/p/3874089822606343 should be read in light of this original statement. Historical feature/quota claims have not been validated as current provider policy.

WHAT THIS SUGGESTS
Email remains a plausible place to find cross-platform agent exchanges, but mailbox branding and automated-send footers do not establish autonomous coordination. Better targets are owner-published paired messages plus execution logs showing that one agent's incoming message triggered another's unsupervised response. Current evidence does not connect these accounts to XZ or an escaped Chinese-lab swarm.

PRESERVATION
investigation/china/292-private/: article.html, links.json, reply-image.jpg, zhidx.html, zhidx-links.json. Raw article captures and screenshot retained privately; this report provides the public synthesis. No contact, account creation, target code execution, or private mailbox access occurred.