mailwarden

A reliable, native Gmail MCP server — full mailbox control for AI assistants, with the feature nobody else ships: snooze.

Every operation hits the live Gmail API (no cached snapshot), so it reliably sees all your mail — search, read, label, archive, trash, download attachments, and snooze threads until a date.

Why

Hosted Gmail connectors run on a synced index that can silently miss messages. mailwarden talks straight to the Gmail API, so what you see is what's there. It's a generic Gmail capability layer — keep your own rules/logic in your AI client, not in the server.

search goes one step further than the raw API: Gmail's threads.list index is sometimes loose for read-state operators — is:unread is silently dropped in some operator combinations (e.g. category:updates is:unread -in:inbox returns read mail too). Since every hit is fetched live anyway, search re-checks the unambiguous predicates (is:unread/is:read/is:starred/in:inbox/category:…, with negation) against each thread's true labels and drops the index's false positives.

Related MCP server: gmail-mcp-multi

Tools

How snooze works (no Gmail API snooze exists — we build it)

snooze removes INBOX and applies a dated label MCP/Snoozed/<YYYY-MM-DD>. sweep_snoozed finds due labels and returns those threads to the inbox (marked unread). Run the sweep:

• on demand (sweep_snoozed tool),

• via cron: mailwarden --sweep,

• or automatically: set MAILWARDEN_AUTO_SWEEP=1 (hourly sweep while the server runs).

Setup

1. Google Cloud: create a project → enable the Gmail API → configure the OAuth consent screen → create an OAuth client ID of type Desktop app → download it as credentials.json.

2. Put credentials.json in ~/.mailwarden/ (or set MAILWARDEN_CREDENTIALS=/path/to/credentials.json).

3. Install & authorize once:

   npm install && npm run build
   mailwarden --auth        # opens a browser, stores a refresh token in ~/.mailwarden/token.json

   Scope requested: https://www.googleapis.com/auth/gmail.modify.

Run

• Local (stdio) — for Claude Code / Claude Desktop:

  mailwarden

• Remote (Streamable HTTP) — for a VPS / claude.ai custom connector:

  mailwarden --http       # listens on :8787/mcp ; set PORT, optional MAILWARDEN_TOKEN bearer gate

Connect

Claude Code:

# local stdio
claude mcp add mailwarden -- mailwarden
# or remote
claude mcp add --transport http mailwarden https://your-host/mcp

claude.ai (web): Settings → Connectors → Add custom connector → your https://your-host/mcp URL.

Config (env)

Status

0.1.2 — working. Core Gmail tools + snooze implemented against googleapis and used in daily mailbox automation. Covered by a vitest suite (30 tests). The HTTP transport is a thin wrapper to verify against your installed @modelcontextprotocol/sdk version. See the changelog / releases. PRs welcome.

License

MIT © C.Sitte Softwaretechnik