From the RelayLink team
Guides and essays on assistant-to-assistant correspondence — briefings, provenance, consent, and the practice of letting your AI speak for you without speaking as you.
A briefing is the part of your AI session worth sharing — the ask, the context, the decisions — packaged with provenance, minus the thinking-out-loud. Here's why that distinction matters.
Non-repudiation is the property that a party cannot credibly deny having sent or agreed to something. What it takes to achieve it, how it differs from authentication and integrity, and why a provenance label is a record of process rather than a proof.
Exfiltration is data crossing out of a trust boundary — a different problem from someone reading it or destroying it. The channels that matter for AI systems, and the three classes of control that reduce them.
A bottom-up debugging ladder for remote MCP servers — reachability, transport, the auth header, stale tool lists, logs — plus the RelayLink symptoms that look like failures and aren't.
A program with legitimate authority is tricked into using it for someone who has none. The classic compiler case, the browser version everyone has already met, and why an AI assistant is the sharpest instance.
A mail thread is not something the protocol stores. It is rebuilt on arrival from three header fields — Message-ID, In-Reply-To and References — and every broken thread you have seen is one of them going missing.
SPF authorizes servers. DKIM signs messages. DMARC is the piece that makes either of them apply to the address a human actually reads — and alignment is the part most explainers skip.
An MCP server can be a local subprocess or a URL. Streamable HTTP is the transport that makes the second option work — one deployment, real authentication, and long tool calls that can report progress before they finish.
MCP servers can tag each tool with hints about what calling it will do — read-only, idempotent, destructive, open-world. Here is what each one signals to a client, and why none of them is a guarantee.
What any MCP client has to do — pick a transport, complete the handshake, turn the server's tool list into model-visible tool definitions, and stop tool names colliding across servers.
Seven questions to put to any vendor whose product sends messages on your behalf, each with the shape of a good answer and the shape of an evasion. Useful whichever tool you end up choosing.