Docs/Getting Started
Review and send emails
Every email Hermes drafts is written from that user's actual data — their activity, behavior, and context. There are no templates to fill in. This is where you review, refine, and send.
The review queue
When a trigger runs in review mode, Hermes places drafted emails into your review queue. Each draft shows you the recipient, the subject line, and the fully rendered email — along with which trigger produced it and the user data snapshot it was written from. Drafts appear in the queue live as they're generated.
For each draft you can:
| Action | What happens |
|---|---|
| Approve | The email is queued for delivery through your configured sender. |
| Regenerate | Hermes rewrites the draft from the same context — new subject and body, same recipient. Use it when a specific draft misses. |
| Reject | The draft is discarded and the person is released — they can be picked up again on a future run. |
All three work in bulk too — approve or regenerate every draft from a trigger at once, from the dashboard, CLI, MCP, or API.
If drafts are consistently off — wrong tone, wrong emphasis — fix the trigger prompt rather than regenerating each email individually. Hermes will draft all future emails accordingly.
Auto-send mode
Once you are confident in how a trigger writes, you can switch it to auto-send. Hermes will draft and send emails automatically without placing them in the review queue. You can switch any trigger back to review mode at any time.
Export as CSV
Prefer to send through your own email system? Export any set of drafts — filtered by trigger, status, or search — as a CSV containing the recipient, subject, and both plain-text and HTML bodies. You get Hermes' drafting; your ESP does the delivery.
After sending
Hermes tracks each email's full journey and shows it on the email's timeline:
- Delivery, bounces, and complaints are recorded automatically.
- Opens are tracked (per-trigger toggle), with filtering to separate real opens from mail-scanner noise.
- Replies flow back into the Hermes Inbox as conversation threads — and into the AI's memory. A person who replied gets treated differently by the evaluator next time; a trigger's follow-ups never repeat what was already said, because the drafter reads the prior thread.
Recurring triggers as follow-ups
Because every draft is written with the full history of what that person already received, recurring triggers double as follow-up campaigns: a person re-enters the funnel after the recurrence cooldown, the evaluator sees they never replied to the first email, and the next draft references it instead of starting over.
What every email is based on
| Principle | What it means |
|---|---|
| Real user data | Each email is written using the data returned by the trigger query for that specific user — plus their prior conversation with you. |
| No mail merge | There is no fill-in-the-blanks template. Hermes writes each email from scratch based on the user and the trigger prompt. Branded layouts come from your email templates, which wrap the copy without constraining it. |
| Your voice | Describe the tone and style in your trigger prompt and Hermes will follow it consistently. Your organization's brand context and accumulated preferences apply across all triggers. |
| Unsubscribe compliance | Marketing emails include an unsubscribe link and RFC 8058 one-click unsubscribe headers automatically. Opt-outs are enforced twice — before drafting and again at send time — so nobody who unsubscribed gets a marketing email, even if a draft was already waiting. |