email-insights

An MCP server that exposes email signal analytics to Claude Desktop.

Project Structure

email-insights/
├── data/
│   └── emails.csv              # Raw email data (id, from, subject, body, date)
├── database/
│   └── signals.db              # SQLite database (created after running ingestion)
├── ingestion/
│   ├── parse_csv.py            # Step 1: Load emails from CSV
│   ├── extract_signals.py      # Step 2: Call local LLM to extract signals
│   └── store_signals.py        # Step 3: Write signals to SQLite (run this)
├── mcp_server/
│   ├── server.py               # MCP server: registers tools and starts listening
│   └── tools.py                # SQLite query functions (no MCP logic here)
├── requirements.txt
└── README.md

Setup

1. Install dependencies

pip install -r requirements.txt

2. Start LM Studio

• Open LM Studio and load any instruction-following model (Llama 3, Mistral, etc.)

• Start the local server: Local Server → Start Server

• Default URL: http://localhost:1234/v1

• Copy the model identifier string and paste it into ingestion/extract_signals.py as LOCAL_MODEL

3. Run the ingestion pipeline

python ingestion/store_signals.py

This reads data/emails.csv, sends each email to your local LLM for signal extraction, and stores the results in database/signals.db.

4. Connect Claude Desktop

Add this server to your Claude Desktop config:

Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "email-insights": {
      "command": "python",
      "args": ["/absolute/path/to/email-insights/mcp_server/server.py"]
    }
  }
}

Restart Claude Desktop. You should see email-insights in the tools list.

MCP Tools

SQLite Schema

CREATE TABLE signals (
    id              INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT,
    email_id        TEXT    UNIQUE,
    topic           TEXT,       -- job application | recruiter outreach | rejection | interview | networking | other
    tone            TEXT,       -- positive | neutral | negative
    sender_type     TEXT,       -- recruiter | company HR | networking contact | university | other
    urgency         TEXT,       -- high | medium | low
    requires_action INTEGER,    -- 0 or 1
    date            TEXT        -- ISO format: YYYY-MM-DD
);

What to Learn from the Code

mcp_server/server.py

• FastMCP("email-insights") — creates the server instance with a display name

• @mcp.tool() — registers the decorated function as a callable MCP tool

• Docstrings matter — Claude reads them to decide when and how to call each tool

• Type hints — FastMCP uses them to build the JSON input schema Claude receives

• mcp.run() — starts the stdio loop; Claude Desktop communicates via stdin/stdout

mcp_server/tools.py

• Completely separate from MCP — plain Python functions returning JSON strings

• Parameterized SQL queries prevent injection: WHERE topic LIKE ? with params

• sqlite3.Row factory lets you access columns by name: row["topic"]

• Returns JSON strings so Claude can parse and reason about the data

ingestion/extract_signals.py

• OpenAI(base_url="http://localhost:1234/v1") — points the client at LM Studio

• Low temperature=0.1 — more deterministic output, better for structured JSON

• Strips markdown code fences the LLM might wrap around its JSON response

• Falls back to safe defaults if parsing fails — pipeline never crashes on one bad email