Hermes Agent email setup

The Hermes email gateway checks an inbox over IMAP and answers over SMTP. On its first start it marks every message already there as seen, and from then on it treats each new message as a turn in a conversation. Point that at your own inbox and every newsletter, bank alert and family email becomes something the agent can act on.

So the docs put it first: use a dedicated email account for your agent, not your personal email. A mailbox of its own also gives people an address to write to, and gives you one place to read everything it sent.

The quick way is hermes gateway setup and choosing Email; the wizard asks for each value. Or write them yourself. This is a mailbox at Faivelo; for another provider, swap in its IMAP and SMTP hosts.

Then start it with hermes gateway, or hermes gateway install to keep it running as a service. On start it tests both connections, so a wrong password shows up straight away.

EMAIL_ALLOWED_USERS is the list of people the agent will answer. Leave it out and Hermes quietly ignores everyone, which looks like a broken setup. Put your own address there, and a colleague's if they should be able to use it.

EMAIL_AUTHSERV_ID is the one that confuses people. Anyone can type a fake From line, so Hermes checks the Authentication-Results header that your receiving server adds to each message. This setting tells it which server to trust. Without it, Hermes drops every message. Open any message in the agent's mailbox, view its raw source, find the top Authentication-Results line and copy the name before the first semicolon. On Gmail the docs give mx.google.com.

Any provider with IMAP and SMTP works. On Gmail or Outlook with two-factor sign-in you need an app password. The address also ends in gmail.com or outlook.com unless you pay for a business plan.

A Faivelo mailbox puts the agent on your own domain, like agent@yourcompany.com, with IMAP and SMTP on by default. Starter is $6 a month flat for every mailbox you make, so a second agent costs nothing more. The first 14 days are free, with no card. Use the same mailbox in webmail or on your phone to read along.

Or let us run Hermes too. Hermes on Faivelo writes every line above for you when it starts, with your own address on the allowed list. New to Hermes? Start with the fastest way to get started with Hermes Agent.