Programmable Email MCP Server

Overview

The Programmable Email MCP server bridges Claude (or any MCP client) with a Gmail account, enabling AI assistants to read and eventually send email directly from the user’s inbox. By leveraging Gmail’s OAuth tokens, the server authenticates securely on behalf of the user while keeping credentials out of the client. This approach solves a common pain point for developers who want to build conversational agents that can interact with personal or business email without exposing sensitive credentials or building a custom backend from scratch.

At its core, the server exposes a set of tools that map to Gmail’s REST API endpoints. The primary feature is retrieving recent unread messages; the implementation currently supports a subset of Gmail’s search syntax, allowing the assistant to filter by label, sender, or date. When a user asks Claude for “my unread emails,” the MCP server translates that request into an OAuth‑authenticated API call, streams the results back to Claude, and then forwards them to the AI’s inference servers. This flow keeps the user data on their own network until it reaches Claude’s infrastructure, respecting privacy while still enabling powerful automation.

Key capabilities include:

• OAuth‑based authentication: Users generate a client‑ID and secret, then store the resulting and . The server reads these files to obtain a refresh token, ensuring long‑term access without repeated logins.
• Email retrieval: The server can query Gmail with simple search strings, returning message metadata and body snippets that Claude can summarize or analyze.
• Extensible tool set: The project is structured to add more Gmail operations, such as sending messages or marking threads as read. These are exposed as separate MCP tools that the assistant can invoke on demand.
• Dockerized deployment: Running the server inside a container isolates dependencies and simplifies distribution across development environments.

Real‑world use cases are plentiful. A customer support assistant could pull a user’s latest support tickets from Gmail, parse the subject and body, and generate concise responses. A personal productivity bot might scan for upcoming calendar invites or meeting requests and suggest scheduling actions. In a corporate setting, an AI could aggregate newsletters or alerts from multiple departments, flagging critical messages for quick review. Because the server communicates through MCP, any client that understands the protocol—Claude Desktop, web clients, or custom front‑ends—can tap into these capabilities without needing to embed OAuth logic themselves.

What sets this MCP server apart is its minimal, modular design focused on experimentation. Developers can spin it up quickly in Docker, tweak the search logic or add new Gmail endpoints, and immediately see changes reflected in Claude’s conversations. The server’s architecture encourages iterative development: as new Gmail API features become available, they can be wrapped in additional tools and exposed to the assistant with little friction. This makes it an ideal playground for building sophisticated email‑centric AI workflows while keeping the integration clean, secure, and easily maintainable.