Inbox → Slack Daily Digest
Set up a Hermes cron job that reads your inbox each weekday morning, classifies and summarizes what's new, and posts a digest to a Slack channel at 9am so you read one message instead of fifty.
Requirements
- During
hermes gateway setup, configure Slack as a messaging surface. You'll need a Slack app with thechat:writescope and the bot token inSLACK_BOT_TOKEN. - Connect Gmail or Outlook — Hermes supports both via the standard OAuth flow documented in
hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/integrations/email. - A cron scheduler (built into Hermes).
- An email integration (Gmail API or Microsoft Graph).
- A Slack gateway (or any of: Telegram, Discord, Teams, etc.).
- An LLM provider (OpenRouter, OpenAI, or local via Ollama).
How to use
Use this recipe when you want to replace manual morning inbox triage with one scheduled team-channel digest.
A Hermes cron job wakes at 9am on weekdays, connects to Gmail or Outlook via OAuth, classifies the inbox into needs reply / FYI / spam, drafts a short summary, and posts it to a Slack channel via the messaging gateway. Hermes does not auto-reply; it produces a digest and surfaces what should be human-signed-off.
This is the Slack variant; the Hermes gateway also supports Telegram, Discord, WhatsApp, Signal, Matrix, Mattermost, SMS, Email, and other surfaces.
The use case is any solo operator or small team that wants a daily inbox digest in their team channel without writing a custom IMAP poller.
The pattern is independent of email provider — swap Gmail for Outlook in the prompt, and the OAuth setup is the only config that changes.
Don't auto-reply. The pattern's value is triage, not sending. If you want auto-replies, add a separate explicit cron that requires human approval before sending.
Post to a low-traffic channel such as #morning-digest or #bot-output so the digest is easy to scan without flooding #general.
0 9 * * 1-5 runs at 9am in the gateway's local timezone. If your VPS is in a different region, set the gateway's TZ or adjust the cron expression.
- Install Hermes and start the gateway so cron runs unattended.
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/main/scripts/install.sh | bash
hermes setup
hermes gateway install
- Complete Slack's messaging-surface setup.
- Complete the selected provider's Hermes email connection.
- Add the cron job. The natural-language prompt is the actual recipe.
/cron add "0 9 * * 1-5" "Every weekday at 9am, summarize my inbox. Classify each new message as
needs-reply / fyi / spam. Draft a one-line summary for each needs-reply item and a bullet
list of fyi items. Post to #morning-digest in Slack. Do not auto-reply to anything."
The [SILENT] token in the final response suppresses the post on days when the inbox is empty.
Links
Source: aliaihub/awesome-hermes-usecases and its contributors. License: CC-BY-4.0. Source license notice.
Translation and editorial adaptation by ClawCases.
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