thunderbird-mcp

An MCP server that gives Claude access to Thunderbird — read and search emails across all connected accounts (including iCloud), look up contacts, and access the unified calendar.

This is an early, read-only build. It works directly with your Thunderbird profile files and does not require Thunderbird to be running.

Status

• ✅ Email read path: list accounts/folders, search emails, read full messages

• ✅ Contacts read path: list address books, list/search contacts

• ⏳ Calendar read path — not yet implemented

• ⏳ Send/manage email, contact and calendar writes (via a Thunderbird WebExtension) — not yet implemented

Related MCP server: mcp-imap-server

Setup

1. Find your Thunderbird profile directory:

   cat ~/.thunderbird/profiles.ini
   ls ~/.thunderbird/

   Pick the profile directory containing Mail/, ImapMail/, abook.sqlite, etc.

2. Install dependencies:

   npm install

3. Copy .env.example to .env and set THUNDERBIRD_PROFILE to your profile directory:

   cp .env.example .env
   # edit .env

4. Verify it works:

   npm run test:tools

Wiring into Claude Desktop / Cowork

Add an entry to ~/.config/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json under mcpServers:

"thunderbird": {
  "command": "node",
  "args": ["/absolute/path/to/thunderbird-mcp/src/index.js"],
  "env": {
    "THUNDERBIRD_PROFILE": "/home/<you>/.thunderbird/<profile-dir>"
  }
}

Restart Claude Desktop. You should then be able to ask things like "list my Thunderbird accounts" or "search my inbox for invoices".

Tools

• list_accounts — lists configured Thunderbird accounts

• list_folders — lists the folder tree for an account

• search_emails — search by account, folder, sender, subject, keyword, date range

• read_email — full headers, text body, and attachment metadata for one message

• list_address_books — lists configured address books and their synced account

• list_contacts — lists/searches contacts by name or email

See docs/ARCHITECTURE.md for how email parsing and message addressing work, and docs/BRIEF.md for the full project scope and roadmap.

Constraints

• Local only — no network exposure, no Cloudflare tunnel

• sqlite3, not better-sqlite3 (required for Node v24 compatibility)

• THUNDERBIRD_PROFILE must be set via environment variable — never hardcoded