How-To Series · 6: Working While You Sleep

Hermes · Agent Email Address

Set up a dedicated mailbox your agent can read and send from using the bundled Himalaya skill, with a cron polling pattern and safety notes.

After this videoYou can give your agent a dedicated mailbox it reads, files, and sends from on a schedule, without exposing your personal inbox.

A dedicated email address turns your agent into something you and services can email: newsletters it summarises, receipts it files, booking confirmations it tracks, and outbound mail it sends on your behalf. The bundled Himalaya skill drives the himalaya CLI over IMAP and SMTP from the agent's terminal tools. Create a fresh mailbox, never your personal inbox, install himalaya, configure IMAP and SMTP, and verify with himalaya envelope list. The path is pull based, so add a cron job to poll the inbox on a schedule. Email is an unauthenticated inbound channel, so never let the agent auto-act on unsolicited mail, confirm before outbound sends, and keep the account low privilege.

About these resources. Every command in this video comes from the Give Your Agent Its Own Email Address doc.

New words here · Plain English

one sentence each · full glossary

HimalayaA command-line email client the agent drives over IMAP and SMTP to read, search, compose, and organise mail.

App passwordA scoped credential for a mailbox that uses two-factor auth, created for the agent instead of your personal password.

Pull basedThe agent only sees mail when it looks, so a cron job polls the inbox on a schedule.

Prompt injection surfaceAn unauthenticated inbound channel like email where anyone can write to the agent, so it must never auto-act on unsolicited mail.

Sources · What this video distills

1 docs page · every command below traces to it

Primary guide

Give Your Agent Its Own Email Address

Commands shown · Copy and paste

each shows the source doc it came from

Install himalayafrom source ↗

curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pimalaya/himalaya/master/install.sh | PREFIX=~/.local sh

Verify the installfrom source ↗

himalaya --version

Verify the mailboxfrom source ↗

himalaya envelope list

Poll the inbox on a schedulefrom source ↗

hermes cron add

Going deeper · Related Hermes docs

further reading · not sources of facts shown above

Email Gateway Adapter

Chat with Hermes over email instead, with a persistent IMAP connection.

Schedule With Cron

Unattended work on a real schedule, outside any session.

The wider prompt-injection and credential-handling picture.

Next in the series · Episodes that build on this

Schedule With Cron

Reads Your Email