Give your Hermes agent its own email address | OpenMail

Quick start

Three commands to a live inbox.

Install, paste a key, start the gateway. If anything is off, hermes openmail doctor says what.

# Install the OpenMail plugin
hermes plugins install openmail --enable

# Paste a key from console.openmail.sh
hermes openmail setup

# Mail now wakes the agent
hermes gateway run

What's included

Everything the agent needs to work by email.

Which plan covers SSO?

Modes

Pick how your agent handles email.

Channel is the default. Change it by hand or ask your agent to do it for you.

Tell maya@northwind.example the sandbox is ready.

Use cases

What your Hermes agent can do with email.

Answer a question by email

Someone writes to the agent's address. Hermes reads the thread and answers in it.

Read an invoice, file the numbers

Forward a PDF or any file. OpenMail extracts the text and Hermes acts on it: here, a row in your sheet.

Summarise a newsletter to Telegram

Point a notify inbox at your subscriptions. OpenMail tags the mail as marketing and Hermes summarises it to your home channel.

The plugin or Hermes's built-in email gateway?

Hermes ships with an email gateway that connects to a mailbox you already have, such as a Gmail account with an app password, over IMAP and SMTP. That's the right choice if you want the agent to work from an existing address. The OpenMail plugin is for when the agent should have an address of its own: the inbox is created through an API, mail is pushed to the agent as it arrives, replies are threaded for you, and you can give the agent a key that only opens its own inbox. You can run both.

Frequently asked questions.

01 How do I give a Hermes agent an email address?

Run hermes plugins install openmail --enable, then hermes openmail setup and paste an OpenMail API key, then hermes gateway run. Setup creates the inbox or picks an existing one, and asks who is allowed to email the agent. Look for "[OpenMail] Connected as

" in the gateway log. hermes openmail doctor checks the setup if anything is off.

02 What does hermes openmail setup do?

Asks for an API key of any scope, picks an inbox or creates one, asks who may email the agent, and writes ~/.hermes/.env. hermes openmail doctor checks the result.

03 Who can email the agent?

The addresses you list during setup, or whoever OpenMail's sender rules allow. Set allow and block rules per account, pod, or inbox in the console or with openmail policy on the CLI. Blocked mail is dropped before the agent sees it.

04 Can one agent handle several inboxes?

Yes. Point the plugin at a pod and it runs every inbox in it. The agent can create more inboxes and send from any of them.

05 Why a plugin instead of an SDK?

Hermes already has a gateway. The plugin registers OpenMail as a platform, so mail wakes the agent over the gateway's websocket with no polling loop and nothing pasted into a prompt. The API key lives in the tools, not the model context.

Every Hermes agent deserves its own inbox.

Three commands, and your agent answers its own mail.