Connect Hermes Agent to Your Email Inbox
Connect Hermes Agent to your email for AI-powered inbox management, auto-replies, and smart filtering.
Connecting Hermes to your email inbox turns it into an AI-powered email assistant — it can draft replies, summarize threads, filter spam, and handle routine correspondence on your behalf.
Before you start:
- ☑Hermes Agent installed
- ☑Your email provider's IMAP and SMTP settings (host, port, credentials)
- ☑An app-specific password if your provider uses 2FA (Gmail, Outlook require this)
Steps
- 1
Configure IMAP
Add your email IMAP settings to config.yaml: host, port, username, password
- 2
Configure SMTP
Add SMTP settings for sending: host, port, username, password, from address
- 3
Set up rules
Define email rules: which emails to process, auto-reply conditions, labeling logic
- 4
Enable the email plugin
Set email: enabled: true in config.yaml
- 5
Test
hermes restart — send yourself a test email and verify Hermes processes it
Pro Tips
- 💡Start with read-only access (IMAP only) before enabling SMTP sending — verify Hermes is summarizing and filtering correctly before letting it reply
- 💡Use rules to limit which emails Hermes processes: filter by sender domain, subject keywords, or label to avoid overwhelming the agent
- 💡Hermes works well with Gmail's label system — assign emails a 'Hermes' label to queue them for processing
Troubleshooting
❌ IMAP authentication fails even with correct credentials
✅ If using Gmail or Outlook with 2FA, generate an app-specific password in your account security settings. Regular passwords won't work when 2FA is enabled.
❌ Hermes reads emails but doesn't mark them as processed
✅ Set 'email: markAsRead: true' in config.yaml so Hermes marks emails after processing. Without this, it may re-process the same emails on each run.
❌ SMTP sending fails with SSL/TLS errors
✅ Check your SMTP port: 465 requires SSL, 587 requires STARTTLS. Set 'email: smtp: tls: true' for port 465 or 'email: smtp: starttls: true' for port 587.