Hermes Agent and email: drafts only

The Hermes gateway polls every 15 seconds and sends its own replies

Yes, Hermes Agent can read and answer your email. Checked 13 October 2026, its documentation says the adapter uses standard IMAP to receive and SMTP to reply, polls for unseen mail every 15 seconds by default, and sends replies by itself with threading headers. The page describes no human approval step before a reply goes out. For a personal assistant that may be exactly what you want.

The same docs list the controls. An allowlist setting (EMAIL_ALLOWED_USERS) limits which sender addresses are processed; with no allowlist, unknown senders are ignored; EMAIL_ALLOW_ALL_USERS=true accepts anyone and the page says to use it with caution. By default Hermes acts only on mail whose Authentication-Results header authenticates the From domain, and you can turn that check off at your own risk. The adapter ignores its own messages and automated senders such as noreply and bulk mail. These are features of Hermes, described by its docs. We have not tested the gateway ourselves.

Staffbox stops at a draft: it has no sending code, so a person presses send

Staffbox does not use the auto-reply route. The command staffbox inbox reads requests from a folder or a mailbox and writes draft replies, each priced line citing the price-list row and the date of that list. The unit has no permission to send email or delete files. A person opens the draft, checks it, and sends it from their own mail program.

After the person sends, the log keeps one line for the task. If the draft was wrong, the correction becomes a test for next month.

Drafts flag unstocked items instead of substituting, and wrong totals fell from 6 to 0

Take a made-up request to the fictional firm Fieldstone IT, an IT provider used in our tests. A customer writes to the quotes mailbox for a price on a quantity of a stocked item and asks whether another item is available. The draft prices the stocked line, names the price-list row and the list's date, and, for the second item, says it is not on the list instead of quoting the nearest product.

That behaviour is deliberate and came from a measured failure. Since the 6 October fix the quote action flags an unstocked item instead of substituting the nearest one (by design; 0 wrong totals in 475 test answers). Before the fix, it priced a nearest item in 5 of the 6 wrong totals we found in a generated regression set on 5 October 2026. On 6 October 2026, on a 16 GB Mac mini M4 with Qwen3 8B, the unit got 15/15 on an unseen messy set, 40/40 on Fieldstone IT and 39/40 on Peachtree Cabinet Works, and 351/360 on the generated regression set (requests written by a model, answers checked by code). Both companies are fictional. The 11 misses: 10 declined and asked the customer, 1 was a routing miss. A decline counts as a miss on our scorecard. No customer has run it yet. More in the Mac mini page. On a new trade it had never seen, an electrical distributor (14 Oct, Dell test box), the default Qwen3 8B setup scored 30 of 40 and 2 of 15 on messy requests, with 8 wrong prices in 55, because per-foot units, price levels and trade shorthand are not handled yet; that is why we score your own list first (the electrical result).

Five setup choices make any agent's email flow safer

1. Use a dedicated quotes mailbox. Forward requests into it; do not give the agent your whole inbox.
2. Write down what it may read and what it may write. Ours: forwarded requests and one price-list file in; drafts and a log out.
3. If you use Hermes's own gateway, set an allowlist and keep sender authentication on.
4. Remove any send permission you do not need.
5. Test 30 past requests before connecting live mail.

For the mechanics of intake see RFQ email intake and quote request email triage. For the draft itself see AI draft replies from a price list.

Sources

• Hermes docs: email gateway, checked 13 Oct 2026
• github.com/Staffbox-ai/staffbox (Staffbox code and evals/results, MIT), `staffbox inbox`; evals/results 2026-10-05 and 2026-10-06
• huggingface.co/spaces/staffbox/scorecard (every graded answer)
• Staffbox Trust Center