evernote-mcp

A self-hosted Evernote MCP server, native to the 2026-07-28 stateless spec.

Point any MCP client at your own machine and it can search, read, create and update notes in your live Evernote account. Your notes never pass through anyone else's server: the only two parties are your client and Evernote.

Built on the official mcp Python SDK 2.0. The 2026-07-28 spec dropped the initialize handshake and session state, so this server answers a single stateless POST per call. Clients still on the old spec keep working through the SDK's fallback path, verified against mcp 1.27.

Tools

Tool	What it does
`list_notebooks`	Every notebook with guid, name, stack, default flag
`search_notes`	Evernote's own search grammar, passed through unmodified
`read_note`	One note by guid, body converted from ENML to markdown
`create_note`	Title plus markdown body, optional notebook
`update_note`	Replace a note's title, body, or both, by guid

Deliberately absent in v1: attachments, tags, sync, and anything that deletes. No tool in this server can remove a note.

search_notes takes Evernote query strings verbatim, so notebook:Recipes intitle:pasta updated:day-7 -tag:archived works exactly as it does in the Evernote app. An empty query returns the most recently updated notes.

Setup

Requires Python 3.11+ and uv.

git clone https://github.com/jayzuccarelli/evernote-mcp
cd evernote-mcp
make sync
cp .env.example .env

1. Get an Evernote token

You need a JSON file with at least token and noteStoreUrl:

{
  "token": "S=s123:U=...",
  "noteStoreUrl": "https://www.evernote.com/shard/s123/notestore"
}

Two ways to produce it:

Developer token. Evernote issues these from your account settings for personal use. Pair it with the note store URL for your shard.
OAuth. Run the standard Evernote OAuth flow with your own consumer key. The access token response carries edam_webApiUrlPrefix; the note store URL is that prefix with notestore appended.

Save the file as ~/.evernote-token.json, or point EVERNOTE_TOKEN_FILE somewhere else.

2. Set a bearer token

EVERNOTE_MCP_TOKEN is the secret that guards your server. It is unrelated to the Evernote credential.

uv run python -c "import secrets; print(secrets.token_urlsafe(32))"

Put it in .env. Leave it unset and the server accepts unauthenticated calls, which is only safe bound to localhost.

3. Run

make run

The server listens on http://127.0.0.1:3402/mcp. Add it to a client:

claude mcp add --transport http evernote http://127.0.0.1:3402/mcp \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer $EVERNOTE_MCP_TOKEN"

Exposing it beyond localhost

Put it behind a reverse proxy that terminates TLS. With Tailscale Funnel:

tailscale funnel --bg --set-path /evernote 3402

Then set both of these in .env:

PUBLIC_URL=https://your-host.ts.net/evernote
TRUST_PROXY=true

PUBLIC_URL is what the server advertises in its RFC 9728 protected resource metadata, so OAuth-aware clients discover the right issuer. TRUST_PROXY relaxes the DNS-rebinding Host header check, which a proxy forwarding a public hostname would otherwise trip. Bearer auth still gates every request.

Markdown and ENML

Evernote stores notes as ENML, an XHTML subset. This server converts on the way out and back on the way in, so tools speak markdown.

The conversion is not lossless. Headings, bullets, checkboxes, links, bold, italic and paragraphs round trip. Tables, images, inline styles and colours do not. Attachments show up as [attachment: image/png] placeholders on read and are dropped on write.

update_note replaces the body wholesale. Read first, edit, then write back if you want to preserve anything.

Development

make check   # ruff lint + format check, then import and tool-registry smoke test

make check runs against tests/fake-token.json, so it needs no Evernote account and touches no network.

License

MIT