Connect Hermes Agent to your email through Mailopoly
Hermes Agent and Mailopoly: one entry in config.yaml gives Hermes your email — every account you own, searched together, already sorted — under permissions you set, with no mailbox password handed to the agent. Add Mailopoly under mcp_servers with auth: oauth, run hermes mcp login mailopoly, tick reading, making changes or sending, and Hermes can search, draft and send across Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, iCloud and any IMAP mailbox — and, with business channels added to your plan, your Slack, Teams and WhatsApp too. Hermes's own “email” features are about an inbox of its own; this page is about it reaching yours.
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This page is about Hermes Agent, Nous Research's self-hosted agent (people also write hermes-agent or nous hermes agent) — not the Hermes language models, which are separate.
Does Hermes Agent support Gmail without Mailopoly?
Not your mailbox. Hermes has an email gateway, but it is the agent's own IMAP/SMTP inbox — its docs say outright not to use your personal email for it. The bundled himalaya skill can read any provider over IMAP with an app password kept in a config file on the machine, raw, one provider at a time.
Mailopoly gives Hermes your real email without a password on disk: one OAuth sign-in, every provider in one connection, every account in one question, mail already filtered by Cleanbox with invoices, events and deliveries extracted, and reading, making changes and sending as separate grants you can revoke.
Before you start
- Hermes Agent, set up and signed in. This guide covers what happens once you have it.
- A Mailopoly account — start one here, 7-day free trial, no credit card.
- The mailboxes you want it to see, connected to Mailopoly. Gmail and Outlook connect with a Google or Microsoft sign-in; Yahoo, iCloud, AOL and IMAP mailboxes use an app password you enter on Mailopoly's own page — never in a chat or a config file. The connect guides have the exact steps for each provider.
Connect Hermes Agent to your email in three steps
1 Connect your mailboxes to Mailopoly
- Start a Mailopoly account at mailopoly.com/sign-up — 7-day free trial, no credit card.
- Connect each mailbox you want Hermes to reach: Gmail or Outlook with a Google or Microsoft sign-in, anything else with an app password from your provider's security settings. Each account gets one line in the same inbox — Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, iCloud, any IMAP mailbox.
- If you want Hermes to have an address of its own, pick one of the @mly.life addresses included in your plan and keep it for the agent's correspondence. It's still your address, on your account, so you see everything it sends and receives.
2 Add Mailopoly to Hermes Agent
- Add to
~/.hermes/config.yaml:mcp_servers: mailopoly: url: "https://fastapi.prod.aws.mailopoly.com/mcp-server/" auth: oauth— or runhermes mcp addand answer its prompts. - Run
hermes mcp login mailopoly; sign in with your Mailopoly account in the browser. Hermes identifies itself to Mailopoly automatically (client metadata, with dynamic registration as the fallback). On a headless machine add--flow deviceand approve from your phone. - Tick what Hermes is allowed to do — reading for search and summaries; making changes for drafts, labels, tasks and reminders; sending only if you want it to send, from any connected address or your @mly.life address.
- Ask, from whichever channel you talk to Hermes on. Tokens live in
~/.hermes/mcp-tokens/.
Official docs: Hermes Agent docs: MCP ↗
3 Give it a job
Whatever you've connected to Mailopoly is what Hermes can reach. Some jobs people hand over on day one:
- Each morning, tell me on Telegram what needs a reply across all my accounts, and draft the two easy ones.
- Find the delivery notice for the parcel and put the window in My Day.
- Reply to Priya from my work address — say the draft is attached in the next message — and leave it in drafts.
What Hermes Agent can do with your email through Mailopoly
- Search every account in one question — Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, iCloud and IMAP together, or one account by name — by sender, date, topic or the half-remembered phrase somewhere in the body.
- Work from the Cleanbox — your personal, non-promotional mail already separated from newsletters, promotions and automated noise, so a summary is a summary of what matters.
- Read summaries, not raw messages — every email arrives already summarised, with invoices, events and deliveries extracted with their amounts, dates and status.
- Keep My Day — see tasks and commitments pulled from every inbox, add tasks and reminders, tick things off.
- Draft and send — save drafts to Mailopoly for you to review, or with the send permission send from whichever connected address fits the conversation, or from your @mly.life address.
- Know what things cost — look up an invoice, total the week's bills, see what your subscriptions add up to.
- Tidy up — label, file or clear mail in bulk, when you tell it to.
- Business channels too — add them to your plan and your Slack, Teams, WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger and TikTok messages sit in the same connection, and replies go back out through the channel they arrived on.
Should you give an agent your email account at all?
The warnings you'll find are right about one thing: an agent that logs in to Gmail as you, with your password, on a machine you don't control, is a bad idea. Mailopoly doesn't work that way. Your Google and Microsoft accounts connect to Mailopoly through their own sign-in, and other providers through an app password you enter on Mailopoly's page — Hermes never has a password in its hands and never logs in to your provider at all.
Hermes Agent connects to Mailopoly with a scoped OAuth sign-in. Reading, making changes and sending are separate grants, sending is flagged as a confirm-first action in the protocol itself, every tool call is audit-logged against your account, and you can revoke Hermes from Settings → Security → Connected AI assistants in the Mailopoly app — access ends immediately. Mailopoly is independently security-assessed to CASA Tier 2 by TAC Security. If you want a hard line, give Hermes reading only, or give it one of your @mly.life addresses to send from so nothing leaves under your name unless you say so. More on whether it's safe to give AI access to your email and the security page.
What goes wrong with Hermes Agent, and the fix
- `hermes mcp login` can't open a browser. Use
hermes mcp login mailopoly --flow deviceand finish the sign-in on your phone or laptop. - You set up the email gateway and expected it to read your Gmail. The gateway is an inbox for the agent itself. Your mail comes through the Mailopoly server entry above.
- It only reads mail when a run is going. For Hermes to be *messaged* by Mailopoly in near real time, and to message you when it's done, see the Hermes Agent guide, which covers the webhook set-up.
- It connected but the tools don't answer. Mailopoly's tools respond on an active subscription or trial. If the trial has lapsed, the connection stays but calls return nothing useful until the plan is active.
- It can read but won't draft or send. Those are separate permissions. Sign in again from Hermes and tick making changes or sending — or check what it holds under Settings → Security → Connected AI assistants in Mailopoly.
Related: Hermes Agent on the Switchboard · Email for AI agents · Connect any IMAP mailbox · Is it safe to give AI access to your email?
7-day free trial, no credit card. Connect your mailboxes, then add Mailopoly to Hermes in about a minute.
Frequently asked questions
Other connect guides
Email providers
- Gmail
- Outlook
- Yahoo Mail
- iCloud Mail
- AOL Mail
- Comcast Email
- Zoho Mail
- Yandex Mail
- GMX
- Fastmail
- IONOS
- QQ Mail
- Web.de
- one.com
- OVH
- 163 Mail
- Alibaba Cloud Mail
- Namecheap Private Email
- Hostinger Email
- STRATO
- Mail.ru
- Naver Mail
- Titan Email
- Seznam.cz
- GoDaddy Workspace Email
- AT&T Mail
- Aruba Mail
- Infomaniak Mail
- Orange Mail
- Libero Mail
- Mail.com
- BT Mail
- Any IMAP Mailbox
Messaging channels
Connect guides by assistant
- Connect your email to Claude
- Connect your email to ChatGPT
- Connect Grok Bot to your email
- Connect Claude Code to your email
- Connect Codex to your email
- Connect OpenClaw to your email
- Connect Cursor to your email
- Connect Gemini CLI to your email
- Connect GitHub Copilot to your email
- Connect Hermes Agent to your email
- Connect Devin to your email
- All connect guides
- Mailopoly MCP — every client
- Agent guides — every AI you run, one inbox
- Email for AI agents — your inbox, not a throwaway one
- Security at Mailopoly
- Is it safe to give AI access to your email?
- The unified inbox: email, apps and agents
