How to Give Your Hermes Agent an Email Address

The one skill the messenger is missing

Hermes is built to grow. It picks up new skills as it works, runs on hardware you control, and keeps going where a one-shot assistant would stop. But the moment a task touches email (confirming a signup, reading a one-time code, replying to a vendor), it stalls. There's no inbox it owns and no clean way to read what arrives. Fitting the messenger with a real, authenticated mailbox closes that gap, and it takes about two minutes.

The recording and screenshots show an earlier signup flow. Follow the current steps below. Exchange mail only between your agent and your verified email address. Upgrade to email anyone. Test with your verified account email first.

Step 1: Create your Robotomail account

Open Robotomail signup. Choose a mailbox name on the signup page. Send that mailbox an email from the address you want to use for your Robotomail account. Enter the verification code from Robotomail's reply, or use the verification link when it becomes available. Then confirm your name and create a password.

• Choose a mailbox
  Pick an available name such as hermes-agent. Its platform address is hermes-agent@robotomail.co.
• Send it an email
  Use the human email address you want attached to your account. Robotomail replies there with a verification code.
• Verify the address
  Enter the code, or use the verification link when it becomes available. This proves you control the sender address.
• Create your account
  Confirm your name and set a password. Your agent uses an API key or OAuth connection, not this password.

Your first email stays in the mailbox when you create your account. Free includes 1 mailbox, 10 sends and 10 receives per month. Exchange mail only between your agent and your verified email address. Upgrade to email anyone. No credit card, no expiry. Allowances reset on the first of each month (UTC). Upgrade for higher limits or a custom domain. Paid plans are billed when you upgrade, with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Step 2: Create and save your API key

Choose the API path during setup to create a key, or finish onboarding and open API keys in the dashboard. Email verification enables access under your plan's limits; payment is optional for Free. If you explicitly selected a paid plan before signup, checkout comes before agent/API setup.

Now grab your API key. Go to API keys, click Create key, give it a name your future self will recognize (for example hermes-agent), and Robotomail shows the full key exactly once. It starts with rm_.

Copy that key directly into a secret manager like 1Password, don't leave it in a scratch file, don't hard-code it into the skill, and don't paste it into a chat window. If you lose it, you can't recover it; you just create a new one and delete the old. The key is the agent's entire credential, so treat it like a password.

Step 3: Drop the skill into Hermes

Hermes has no skill store for this, and it doesn't need one. A Robotomail skill is just a markdown file. Tell Hermes to add it from robotomail.com/skill and it drops the file straight into its skills folder, no install step, no client library, no build. Then point it at your API key in 1Password rather than pasting the secret into the chat.

Add the robotomail skill from https://robotomail.com/skill
into your skills folder.

My Robotomail API key is in 1Password under "Robotomail".
Pull it from there when you need it. Don't ask me to paste it
into the chat.

Because the skill lives as plain markdown in the agent's own folder, everything stays on the server you control, and a vault reference keeps the secret out of the transcript and logs. The skill describes a small set of tools (send, list, read, and reply) so the agent has everything it needs and nothing it doesn't. See the full agent skill.

Live demo: watch the messenger work

For a Free test, send a verification-style message yourself from your verified account email. Exchange mail only between your agent and your verified email address. Upgrade to email anyone. Configure a webhook or SSE stream to receive events, or let your agent poll the API. The code is text in body_text; your agent extracts it.

{
  "event": "message.received",
  "timestamp": "2026-06-06T10:00:00.000Z",
  "data": {
    "message_id": "b2c3d4e5-6789-4abc-def0-222222222222",
    "mailbox_id": "a1b2c3d4-5678-4def-abcd-111111111111",
    "mailbox_address": "hermes-agent@robotomail.co",
    "from": "no-reply@acme.com",
    "to": ["hermes-agent@robotomail.co"],
    "subject": "Confirm your email",
    "body_text": "Your verification code is 481920. It expires in 10 minutes.",
    "thread_id": "c3d4e5f6-789a-4bcd-ef01-333333333333",
    "received_at": "2026-06-06T10:00:00.000Z"
  }
}

The agent grabs the code straight out of the body, finishes the signup, then forwards the confirmation to you, one POST to the messages endpoint. Robotomail returns the message ID. Inbound to outbound, fully autonomous.

curl -X POST https://api.robotomail.com/v1/mailboxes/mbx_hermes/messages \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer rm_your_api_key" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "to": ["you@company.com"],
    "subject": "Signup confirmed ✓",
    "bodyText": "Done. I read the code, finished the signup, and the account is active."
  }'

{
  "message": {
    "id": "b2c3d4e5-6789-4abc-def0-222222222222",
    "direction": "OUTBOUND",
    "toAddresses": ["you@company.com"],
    "status": "SENT",
    "threadId": "c3d4e5f6-789a-4bcd-ef01-333333333333"
  }
}

Going further

Need more? It's all there. Three of the most common next steps:

• Bring your own custom domain
  The platform domain (@robotomail.co) is great for getting started. When you want the agent to send as hermes@yourcompany.com, upgrade to a paid plan and add a custom domain. Robotomail generates the DNS records you need (MX, a send MX, SPF, DMARC, and one or more DKIM records) and verifies them as soon as propagation completes.
• Fire a webhook on every inbound message
  Register a webhook URL and Robotomail POSTs every inbound message to it within seconds of receipt, signed with HMAC-SHA256 so you can verify it before trusting the payload.
• Subscribe to a live event stream
  No public URL to expose on your server? Open a server-sent event (SSE) connection to GET /v1/events and the agent streams inbound events over a single long-lived request, no webhook endpoint required.

curl -X POST https://api.robotomail.com/v1/webhooks \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer rm_your_api_key" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "url": "https://your-server.com/webhook",
    "events": ["message.received"]
  }'

$ npx @robotomail/cli domain verify acme.com
⏳ checking DNS...
✓ MX       propagated
✓ SPF      valid
✓ DKIM     aligned
✓ DMARC    policy ok
✓ acme.com is fully verified.

GET /v1/events?events=message.received
Authorization: Bearer rm_your_api_key
Accept: text/event-stream

# Each inbound message arrives as a standard SSE frame:
id: 1717668000000-0000-a3f1
event: message.received
data: {"event":"message.received","timestamp":"2026-06-06T10:00:00.000Z","data":{"message_id":"b2c3d4e5-...","mailbox_address":"hermes-agent@robotomail.co","from":"no-reply@acme.com","subject":"Confirm your email","body_text":"Your verification code is 481920.","received_at":"2026-06-06T10:00:00.000Z"}}

The stream replays missed events on reconnect via Last-Event-ID, see the Events (SSE) API docs for the full frame format and reconnect semantics.

For the full picture (the four agent tools, error handling, and a copy-paste signup-to-send walkthrough) see the longer guide for any AI agent and the companion OpenClaw walkthrough.

Frequently asked questions