A manager approves an agent's customer email. Before sending, the agent refreshes the account brief and adds a new sentence about a delivery date. The email is better informed and no longer the message the manager approved.

Google's Gmail draft documentation makes the underlying distinction concrete: a draft has a stable container identifier, while replacing its message changes the underlying message identifier. Your workflow has to review the version that will leave the mailbox.

A firsthand n8n workflow question describes manual document approval followed by an agent-created email draft, including difficulty attaching the approved file. Inspect the delivered proposal as a whole, since approving a source document does not verify the outgoing attachment or message.

Define the send decision in plain terms#

An approval identifies who receives the message, which account sends it, the subject and body, the attachments, and the business purpose. A reviewer who approved a short update to the account owner has not approved the same update copied to the customer's procurement list.

The review view shows the rendered message as the recipient will see it, with readable link destinations and attachment names and versions. A note saying "includes the latest pricing sheet" is insufficient when a file can be replaced after review.

Take an agent that prepares a rollout update with an attached schedule. The customer success manager approves it at noon. At one, the project manager moves a milestone. The next action is to show the changed milestone and revised text for review, or to send the approved version if it remains appropriate under the team's rules. The agent should not choose silently.

Split preparation from delivery#

Give the agent permission to research and draft within the intended scope, and give sending its own explicit decision. That keeps most of the time savings and stops "prepare a reply" from becoming permission to contact a customer.

A workable sequence:

Resolve the customer, conversation, and sender mailbox.
Prepare the message and attachments from named sources.
Present the exact send proposal for approval.
Recheck that the proposal still matches the approved version.
Send once through the authorized route.
Record the provider's result and link the sent message when the provider returns one.

If any material field changes at step four, explain the difference. A changed recipient, new commercial promise, different attachment, or revised amount is material. A team can allow narrowly defined formatting corrections, defined ahead of time. The model should not decide what a reviewer would have accepted.

Handle two editors and a stale approval#

People sometimes edit the mailbox draft directly while the agent is preparing to send it. The workflow must read the current contents before delivery. If the agent cannot establish that they match the approved proposal, it returns a new preview, and never overwrites the person's edit to preserve an old approval.

If the draft changed after approval, the send stops until someone approves again.

An approval can also go stale without a draft edit. The customer cancels the request, a colleague replies first, or an important fact changes. Set a validity period for the job and recheck the conversation before sending.

If sending fails, keep the approved version and classify the failure. A permission error calls for connection repair. An uncertain timeout calls for reconciliation with the mailbox before another send.

Test the material differences#

Use a controlled mailbox to try a changed attachment, an added copied recipient, a colleague's manual edit, and a customer reply arriving during approval. Confirm that each produces the intended review or cancellation outcome. Also check a harmless formatting change, if your policy permits it, so staff do not learn to ignore requests caused by trivial edits.

Success means sent messages match what an authorized person approved and the history explains any later change.

With your existing agent, Deixic applies approvals to sensitive actions routed through it and keeps a history of decisions and results in action evidence. Keep the sending route and mailbox permissions aligned with that decision.