Build an AI Inbox Triage Agent That Drafts Your Replies

Most email overload isn't about volume — it's about the cognitive overhead of deciding what matters, what can wait, and what deserves a thoughtful reply right now. An AI triage agent shifts that overhead off your plate: it reads the inbox continuously, sorts messages by urgency and type, and drops a draft reply into your Drafts folder for anything it can handle. You show up, review, and send. That's it.

This guide walks through building exactly that with Hermes on AgentRoost. Hermes is a persistent AI assistant framework — always-on, context-aware across days, and capable of running scheduled tasks. Unlike a script you fire manually, Hermes stays alive, checks your inbox on a schedule, and keeps a rolling memory of what it has already triaged so it doesn't double-process threads.

What the Agent Actually Does

Before touching any config, it helps to be precise about the pipeline:

1. Poll — every N minutes, connect to an IMAP mailbox and fetch unread messages (or messages with a specific label/folder).
2. Classify — for each message, decide which bucket it falls into:
   • Needs human decision (complex, sensitive, requires context the agent doesn't have)
   • Can be answered with a standard reply (FAQs, scheduling requests, acknowledgements)
   • Noise / newsletters — archive silently
3. Draft — for "can be answered" messages, generate a contextually appropriate reply using the LLM and save it to Drafts via SMTP/IMAP APPEND.
4. Notify — send you a Telegram message summarising what happened: "3 triaged, 2 need your attention."

The result: you open your email client and find a Drafts folder with ready-to-review responses. High-signal items are flagged in Telegram. Low-signal items are already archived.

Setting Up the Hermes Agent on AgentRoost

Hermes runs on AgentRoost as a persistent, always-on workspace. Here is the exact journey:

1. Sign up at agentroost.app (email/password, Google, Microsoft, or Discord).
2. Go to Agents → Hermes, click Create, and give it a name like inbox-triage.
3. Once provisioned (~2 minutes), open the AgentRoost manager bot on Telegram and /start your new agent.
4. Configure your agent's connector hooks (see below). AI credits are already loaded — no API key to paste anywhere.

That's the full infrastructure step. No servers, no Docker, no SSL certificate.

Configuring the Inbox Connector

Hermes uses connector hooks — named integrations that the agent can call as tools. For email triage you need two:

IMAP read hook — connects to your mailbox and fetches unread messages. Provide:

connector: imap_reader
host: imap.gmail.com        # or your provider's IMAP host
port: 993
tls: true
username: [email protected]
password: "{{secret:IMAP_PASSWORD}}"
folder: INBOX
fetch_limit: 20             # messages per poll cycle
mark_seen: false            # let the agent track state, not the seen flag

SMTP draft hook — saves generated text as a Draft (not send). Use Gmail's IMAP APPEND to the [Gmail]/Drafts folder, or your provider's equivalent.

connector: smtp_draft
host: smtp.gmail.com
port: 587
starttls: true
username: [email protected]
password: "{{secret:SMTP_PASSWORD}}"
draft_folder: "[Gmail]/Drafts"

Gmail note: create an App Password rather than using your main password. Outlook/365 works the same way via imap.outlook.com / smtp-mail.outlook.com.

Secrets go into AgentRoost's secret vault — they never appear in logs.

The Triage Prompt

The heart of the agent is its system prompt plus the per-message classification call. A practical starting point:

You are an email triage assistant for {{user_name}}.

For each email you receive, output JSON with this shape:
{
  "id": "<message-id>",
  "bucket": "draft" | "flag" | "archive",
  "priority": "high" | "normal" | "low",
  "draft_body": "<reply text or null>",
  "reason": "<one sentence>"
}

Rules:
- bucket=draft  → you can write a complete, professional reply; save it as a Draft.
- bucket=flag   → needs the human; send a Telegram alert with the subject + sender + reason.
- bucket=archive → newsletters, automated notifications, cold outreach with no action required.

When writing drafts:
- Match the sender's register (formal → formal, casual → casual).
- Keep replies concise — under 150 words unless the email is long.
- Never invent facts. If you're unsure, switch to bucket=flag.
- Sign off as: {{signature}}

The {{user_name}} and {{signature}} slots are filled from Hermes's persistent memory — you set them once during onboarding and the agent carries them across every run.

Scheduling the Poll Loop

Hermes supports scheduled tasks defined in the agent config:

schedule:
  - name: inbox_poll
    cron: "*/15 * * * *"   # every 15 minutes
    task: run_triage_pipeline

The run_triage_pipeline task calls the IMAP hook, runs classification for each message, calls the SMTP draft hook for bucket=draft items, and fires a Telegram summary. Because Hermes persists state across runs, it keeps a set of already-processed message IDs — so a 15-minute poll never re-processes the same thread.

You can tune the cron to "0 */1 * * *" (hourly) during off-hours and "*/5 * * * *" during your work day if you want tighter coverage when you're active.

Avoiding the Common Pitfalls

Over-eager drafting. Start with a conservative prompt that flags anything ambiguous. A draft sent without review that sounds off is worse than no draft at all. After a week, look at which flag items you actually could have drafted and tighten the rules.

Thread context. IMAP gives you the latest message but not the full thread history by default. Fetch the References header and pull the last 2-3 messages in the thread before classifying. Hermes's memory layer can cache thread summaries so it doesn't re-fetch the whole chain every cycle.

Rate limits. IMAP connections have per-account limits. Keep fetch_limit reasonable (20-50) and add a short sleep between batches if you have a high-volume inbox.

False archives. Never auto-delete. Set bucket=archive to apply a label (e.g., _triaged/auto) and remove from inbox — so you can audit or recover anything the agent mis-classified.

Cost Reality

On AgentRoost, the LLM calls that power classification and draft generation run against included credits — you are not paying per-token on top of your subscription. A typical 15-minute poll that processes a batch of emails and drafts a handful of replies draws from that pool at a rate most subscriptions handle comfortably. The base plan starts at $19.99/mo all-in, which covers the persistent compute, the Telegram bot provisioning, and the AI credits. No surprise bills from OpenAI or Anthropic.

If you run a higher-volume inbox, the Plus or Pro tiers give you more included credits and more compute. You can compare plans to see what fits.

Try It in Two Minutes

The full stack — persistent agent, IMAP connector, LLM calls, Telegram notifications — runs as a single Hermes workspace. There is nothing to install, no Docker image to maintain, no SSL certificate to renew.

Sign up, spin up a Hermes agent, paste in the connector config and triage prompt above, set the cron schedule, and your inbox triage is live. Get started with Hermes →

If you want to go further — adding a step that logs triage decisions to a Google Sheet, or routing certain senders to a higher-priority queue — you can extend the agent's toolset with additional connector hooks without changing anything about the core setup.

Your inbox becomes a review queue. That's a meaningful shift.