google-accounts-mcp

One MCP server for all your Google accounts — multi-account by design. 51 tools across six surfaces: Gmail, a shared Google Drive folder for file handoff, a cross-MCP shared filesystem, per-account Google Calendar (incl. calendar management), Google Tasks, and Google Contacts (read/write on saved contacts). Every tool takes an account parameter; authorize as many Google accounts as you like and address them by name or unique substring. Built on the Python MCP SDK (FastMCP); runs as a local stdio server or a containerized Streamable HTTP service with bearer auth. Works with any MCP client.

Unofficial project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Google.

Table of Contents

• Quick Start

• Tool Reference

  • Account Management

  • Search & Read

  • Drafts & Sending

  • Labels & Lifecycle

  • Attachments

  • Drive File Store

  • Calendar

  • Tasks

  • Contacts

• Authentication

• Multi-Account Model

• Configuration

• Architecture

• Development

• Testing

• Local stdio Mode

• Container Deployment

• MCP Client Registration

Related MCP server: mcp-gsuite

Quick Start

One-time Google Cloud setup: create (or pick) a GCP project, enable the Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar, Google Tasks, and People APIs, and create an OAuth client ID of type Desktop app (APIs & Services → Credentials). That client ID/secret is what authorize.py uses for the local browser consent flow.

# Prerequisites: Python 3.12+, uv
uv sync

export GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID=...
export GOOGLE_CLIENT_SECRET=...
export TOKEN_DB_PATH=~/.local/share/google-accounts-mcp/tokens.db

# Authorize one or more Google accounts (opens a browser per account;
# stores refresh tokens in the SQLite DB, chmod 600)
uv run scripts/authorize.py you@example.com second@gmail.com

# Run over stdio (what most MCP clients spawn)
uv run google-accounts-mcp --stdio

# ...or as an HTTP server (requires MCP_BEARER_TOKEN)
MCP_BEARER_TOKEN=... uv run google-accounts-mcp
# Streamable HTTP at http://0.0.0.0:8321/mcp

Tool Reference

Every tool accepts an optional account parameter. When omitted it falls back to DEFAULT_ACCOUNT (configured via env var). Partial account matches are resolved automatically if unambiguous.

Account Management

Search & Read

Drafts & Sending

Both draft_email and send_email take the same parameters:

Each attachments entry is a scheme:value string:

• local:<path> — file under ATTACHMENTS_DIR. Path may be relative (e.g. local:uploads/report.pdf after upload_file) or reference a previously downloaded attachment (local:<message_id>/<filename>). Paths outside ATTACHMENTS_DIR are rejected.

• shared:<filename> — file on the cross-MCP shared mount (/shared), e.g. staged there by notion-mcp's notion_download_file(destination='shared'). Bare filenames only; verify staging with list_shared_files.

• drive:<name-or-id> — file in the shared Drive folder. Tries name lookup first, falls back to treating the value as a Drive file ID; in either case the file must live inside the shared folder.

# Example
send_email(
    to=["alice@example.com"],
    subject="Q2 report",
    body="See attached.",
    attachments=["local:uploads/q2.pdf", "drive:charts.xlsx"],
)

draft_email writes to the Drafts folder; send_email dispatches immediately (use with care).

Shared-Store Semantics

The shared mount at /shared (host path ~/.local/share/containers/data/mcp-shared/) is read/write from both MCP servers and has two invariants worth knowing:

• Filename clashes auto-rename, atomically. If download_attachment is asked to write invoice.pdf into shared storage and a file with that name already exists, the new one lands at invoice-2.pdf (invoice-3.pdf, etc.). The create uses O_CREAT | O_EXCL so two concurrent writers never clobber each other, even without a prefix. The return value always reports the actual saved filename and the source='shared:<actual-name>' string to pass to notion-mcp, so the agent never has to guess.

• Explicit namespacing via prefix. In batch workflows where multiple messages may legitimately carry the same filename (e.g. 20 different senders whose attachment is invoice.pdf), the auto-rename is safe but ugly. Pass prefix=f"{message_id}_" to download_attachment and the files land as m1_invoice.pdf, m2_invoice.pdf, ... instead of invoice.pdf, invoice-2.pdf, invoice-3.pdf, which is much easier to reason about when correlating back to the source message.

• 24h TTL. Files in shared storage are purged 24 hours after their last modification by the mcp-shared-purge.timer user unit on the host. This is a safety net for forgotten handoffs, not a backup — stage to Notion (or rename out of the shared dir) within that window. Agents that want immediate cleanup after a workflow can call the purge_shared_files tool (see below).

Cross-MCP File Handoff to notion-mcp

google-accounts-mcp and notion-mcp share a volume (/shared in both containers, host path ~/.local/share/containers/data/mcp-shared/) so files move between servers without base64-through-MCP — in both directions. Every transfer tool reports the sha256 of the bytes it moved, so an agent can verify integrity end-to-end without shell access. The canonical pipeline for attaching a Gmail attachment to a Notion row:

download_attachment(
    message_id="19a1b2...",
    filename="invoice.pdf",
    destination="shared",              # writes SHARED_DIR/invoice.pdf
)
# Then from notion-mcp:
notion_add_file_to_row(
    page_id="...",
    source="shared:invoice.pdf",       # reads the same bytes
    files_property="Attachments",
)

And the reverse — emailing a file stored in Notion:

# From notion-mcp:
notion_download_file(
    block_id="...",                    # from notion_list_files_on_page
    destination="shared",              # writes SHARED_DIR/<name>
)
# Then from this server:
draft_email(
    to=["alice@example.com"],
    subject="Contract",
    body="Attached.",
    attachments=["shared:contract.pdf"],
)

No size limit — the file bytes never traverse MCP parameters. For cases where Drive persistence is also wanted, use drive_upload(local_filename=...) instead of passing content_base64 so the bytes stay on disk end-to-end.

Labels & Lifecycle

modify_labels("msg-id", add_labels=["STARRED"], remove_labels=["INBOX", "UNREAD"])

Attachments

Outgoing attachments must live under ATTACHMENTS_DIR — the server refuses paths outside it to prevent exfiltration. Use upload_file to stage a new file or reference a previously downloaded attachment path.

Reading PDF attachments from a sandboxed agent. An MCP client running in a sandbox VM typically cannot see ATTACHMENTS_DIR or SHARED_DIR on this server, and return_base64=True on a multi-MB PDF blows past most MCP clients' parameter-size ceilings. Use extract_attachment_text to pull structured text (with a 200 KB response ceiling and a pages= range selector for anything bigger) and render_attachment_page for one-page bitmaps when text extraction isn't enough.

PDF OCR

Scanned / image-only PDFs have no text layer, so native extraction returns nothing. extract_attachment_text handles this with three reading tiers (implemented in src/google_accounts_mcp/pdf_read.py, duplicated verbatim in the sibling notion-mcp project — edit both copies together). OCR is delegated to an xberg server — pages are rasterised locally (pypdfium2) and uploaded as PNGs in one multipart POST /extract:

In ocr='auto', an OCR failure (xberg down, extraction error) never breaks extraction — the native-text result is returned with an ocr_error field instead. ocr='force'/'llm' propagate the error.

Env (set per deployment):

The vlm key rides per-request because xberg 1.0.8 skips provider-env key resolution whenever vlm_config.base_url is overridden (verified 2026-08-03) — revisit server-side key placement if upstream fixes that.

For one-off visual questions, skip OCR entirely: render_attachment_page returns a real MCP image content block by default, so the calling model just looks at the page.

Drive File Store

A shared Google Drive folder (DRIVE_FOLDER_NAME on DRIVE_ACCOUNT) acts as a persistent file store for attachments that outlive a single server restart. Files uploaded via drive_upload can be passed to draft_email / send_email via the drive_attachments parameter — even from mailboxes other than the Drive-owning account.

Calendar

Per-account Google Calendar read/write via the full calendar OAuth scope (since 2026-07-04; events + calendarList + calendar management). Every Gmail account has its own calendar surface — the same account parameter used by Gmail tools also selects which calendar you operate on. Existing accounts must re-run authorize.py after a scope change, since the OAuth consent is fixed at grant time (old refresh tokens return insufficientPermissions on calendar calls).

Why two scopes: calendar.events covers every events/* endpoint (list / get / insert / patch / delete / move / quickAdd / instances / freebusy), but calendarList is a separate surface with its own scope. Adding calendar.calendarlist.readonly is the narrowest way to give the list_calendars tool what it needs — still strictly less permissive than the full calendar scope (no ACL changes, no calendar create/delete, no settings).

Time-value model: a bare YYYY-MM-DD string makes an all-day event; anything else is treated as an RFC3339 dateTime (2026-04-14T15:00:00+10:00 or 2026-04-14T15:00:00 + an explicit timezone IANA name). The timezone parameter is silently dropped for date-only values because Google Calendar rejects timeZone on all-day events. When your dateTime already carries an offset, timezone is optional.

# Create a timed event with attendees and a popup reminder
create_event(
    summary="Architecture review",
    start="2026-04-15T10:00:00+10:00",
    end="2026-04-15T11:00:00+10:00",
    account="alice@example.com",
    attendees=["alice@example.com", "bob@example.com"],
    reminders_minutes=[10],
    send_updates="all",
)

# Window query
list_events(
    account="alice@example.com",
    time_min="2026-04-14T00:00:00+10:00",
    time_max="2026-04-15T00:00:00+10:00",
    query="standup",
)

# RSVP to an invite
respond_to_event(
    event_id="abc123",
    response="yes",
    account="alice@example.com",
    comment="Running 5 min late",
)

Tasks

Per-account Google Tasks read/write via the tasks OAuth scope (the only write scope Google offers for Tasks — there is no narrower option). task_list defaults to @default, the API alias for the account's default list, so single-list users never need list_task_lists.

Due-date model: the Tasks API stores only a DATE — any time component in an RFC3339 value is discarded server-side. Tools accept a bare YYYY-MM-DD and expand it to midnight UTC for the API.

Contacts

People API lookup + read/write on saved contacts (contacts + contacts.other.readonly scopes; write support added 2026-07-04). The second scope covers Google's "Other contacts" pool (people the account has emailed but never saved — the Gmail autocomplete list), searched by default and tagged [other] in results. That pool is read-only at the API level; the supported write path is save_other_contact, which copies an entry into My Contacts where it becomes editable.

Search-cache warmup: Google's contact search reads from a lazily-populated cache; the first search per account per process issues a warmup request and pauses ~2 s (per Google's documented guidance) before the real query. Subsequent searches are immediate.

# Resolve a name before drafting
search_contacts(query="alice", account="alice@example.com")

# Capture a follow-up from an email thread
create_task(
    title="Reply to Alice re: contract",
    due="2026-07-07",
    notes="thread: <message-id>",
    account="alice@example.com",
)

Authentication

Bearer auth (HTTP mode only): the HTTP server refuses to start without MCP_BEARER_TOKEN. Every request (except /.well-known/* discovery probes) must carry an Authorization: Bearer <token> header. Local stdio mode (--stdio) has no network surface and skips bearer auth entirely.

Google OAuth 2.0: each Gmail account is authorized once via scripts/authorize.py, which runs the installed-app OAuth flow and stores the resulting refresh token in a SQLite DB (tokens.db). Access tokens are refreshed on demand by the google-auth library — no background refresher. If you run both a container deployment and local stdio copies, remember the DB is a per-machine file: re-authorizing means copying the refreshed tokens.db to each deployment (and restarting the container so cached service objects drop stale credentials).

Scopes (authorize.py requests the full set on every account — a scope addition therefore requires a one-time re-auth of each existing account, since consent is fixed at grant time):

• https://www.googleapis.com/auth/gmail.modify — read/write/label on all authorized mailboxes.

• https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive.file — only files the app creates (i.e. the shared DRIVE_FOLDER_NAME folder). Although granted everywhere, the drive tools only ever operate against DRIVE_ACCOUNT.

• https://www.googleapis.com/auth/calendar — full calendar scope (2026-07-04; replaced the narrower calendar.events + calendar.calendarlist.readonly pair when calendar management — create/update/delete calendar — was added; see Calendar).

• https://www.googleapis.com/auth/tasks — Google Tasks read/write (no narrower write scope exists).

• https://www.googleapis.com/auth/contacts + https://www.googleapis.com/auth/contacts.other.readonly — read/write on saved contacts (2026-07-04; was contacts.readonly) plus read-only access to the "Other contacts" autocomplete pool (Google offers no write scope for that pool — promote entries with save_other_contact).

Multi-Account Model

All tools accept account as an optional parameter. Resolution:

1. Empty → DEFAULT_ACCOUNT if set, else the sole authorized account (a clear error lists the options when several exist).

2. Exact match against stored accounts.

3. Case-insensitive substring match — if unique, used; if ambiguous, raises.

After scripts/authorize.py completes you must restart the container so the in-memory service objects pick up the new credentials.

Configuration

All env vars are optional unless noted. Path defaults assume the container layout (/data); set them explicitly for local runs.

Architecture

┌─────────────────┐   HTTP + Bearer    ┌──────────────────┐
│  Claude Code /  │ ─────────────────▶ │ google-accounts- │
│  VS Code / etc  │                    │  mcp (FastMCP)   │
└─────────────────┘                    └────────┬─────────┘
                                                │
                              ┌─────────────────┼─────────────────┐
                              ▼                 ▼                 ▼
                       ┌─────────────┐  ┌─────────────┐  ┌───────────────┐
                       │  Gmail API  │  │  Drive API  │  │  tokens.db    │
                       │  (per acct) │  │  (1 acct)   │  │  (SQLite)     │
                       └─────────────┘  └─────────────┘  └───────────────┘

Key design points:

• SQLite token store (auth.py) — one row per account keyed by email, holding the OAuth refresh token. Opened fresh per query; no long-lived sqlite connection.

• Lazy service cache — googleapiclient Resource objects are built on first use per account and cached in-memory for the life of the process. Credentials auto-refresh via AuthorizedHttp.

• Threadpool tool offload (server.py) — the MCP SDK runs synchronous @mcp.tool() handlers inline on the event loop, so a single blocking httplib2 call would freeze every other request (the cause of the 4-minute "server unresponsive" stalls). mcp.tool is wrapped so each sync tool is registered as an async wrapper that runs the body in a worker thread (anyio.to_thread.run_sync); the loop stays free for concurrent and cheap calls. The wrapper preserves the tool signature (so client schemas are unchanged — no restart needed) and returns the original sync function as the module name (so tool-to-tool calls and tests still work). Cached httplib2 objects aren't thread-safe, so _RetryingHttp serialises one account's socket with a per-instance RLock while letting other accounts run in parallel. Each call logs tool=… outcome=… duration_ms=… to stderr for your log pipeline.

• Container healthcheck — python -m google_accounts_mcp.healthcheck does a full HTTP round-trip to /mcp; a wedged event loop fails the probe so a restart-on-unhealthy policy self-heals the container.

• PDF resource management — render_attachment_page and the OCR branch of extract_attachment_text close their pypdfium2 document/page/bitmap handles in try/finally (PDFium native memory isn't reclaimed deterministically by Python's GC). A threading.Semaphore caps concurrent rasterisation/parse — set PDF_MAX_CONCURRENCY (default 4) to tune. Run the container with MALLOC_ARENA_MAX=2 so glibc returns freed memory to the OS instead of retaining it in per-thread arenas. A 108-call mixed extract+render stress run across three accounts holds RSS flat (~320 MiB, well under the 1 GB cap) with zero restarts.

• Pure ASGI bearer middleware — wraps the Streamable HTTP app (/mcp, stateless) and short-circuits unauthenticated requests with a 401, using hmac.compare_digest for constant-time comparison. /.well-known/* paths pass through so MCP clients don't confuse 401 for an OAuth-protected server.

• Path-traversal guards — _resolve_attachments rejects any path that resolves outside ATTACHMENTS_DIR, and upload_file / drive_upload require bare filenames with no path components.

Development

# Syntax check before building
python3 -c "import py_compile; py_compile.compile('src/google_accounts_mcp/server.py', doraise=True)"

# Build the container image
podman build -t google-accounts-mcp .   # or: docker build

The Streamable HTTP transport is stateless, so a rebuild never breaks client sessions. If tool signatures changed, restart your MCP client so it re-fetches the schemas.

Testing

Three tiers:

# Tier 1 — pure helpers (no API, no mocking)
uv run --extra test pytest tests/test_gmail_helpers.py -v

# Tier 2 — Gmail client logic with mocked googleapiclient
uv run --extra test pytest tests/test_gmail_client.py -v

# Tier 1 + 2 — Calendar client (pure helpers + mocked calendar service)
uv run --extra test pytest tests/test_calendar_client.py -v

# Tier 1 + 2 — Tasks / Contacts clients (pure helpers + mocked services)
uv run --extra test pytest tests/test_tasks_client.py tests/test_contacts_client.py -v

# PDF reading / OCR tiers (pdf_read module + tool plumbing; the xberg
# HTTP calls are mocked — no network)
uv run --extra test pytest tests/test_pdf_read.py -v

# All unit tests together (fast, safe, run after every code change)
uv run --extra test pytest tests/test_gmail_helpers.py tests/test_gmail_client.py tests/test_calendar_client.py tests/test_tasks_client.py tests/test_contacts_client.py tests/test_pdf_read.py tests/test_retrying_http.py

# Tier 3 Gmail — live Gmail + Drive round-trip (gated)
GMAIL_TEST_ACCOUNT=you@example.com \
  TOKEN_DB_PATH=~/.local/share/google-accounts-mcp/tokens.db \
  ATTACHMENTS_DIR=~/.local/share/google-accounts-mcp/attachments \
  GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID=... GOOGLE_CLIENT_SECRET=... \
  uv run --extra test pytest tests/test_integration.py -v

# Tier 3 Calendar — live Google Calendar round-trip (gated by the same
# env var). Every test creates its own event and deletes it in a finally
# block; nothing is left on the calendar on success. Events are scheduled
# 24+ hours out to stay off the visible week.
GMAIL_TEST_ACCOUNT=you@example.com \
  TOKEN_DB_PATH=~/.local/share/google-accounts-mcp/tokens.db \
  GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID=... GOOGLE_CLIENT_SECRET=... \
  uv run --extra test pytest tests/test_calendar_integration.py -v

# Tier 3 Tasks — live Google Tasks round-trip in a dedicated scratch task
# list (created and deleted by the module). Tier 3 Contacts — read-only
# live smoke of search/list/get (nothing to clean up by construction).
GMAIL_TEST_ACCOUNT=you@example.com \
  TOKEN_DB_PATH=~/.local/share/google-accounts-mcp/tokens.db \
  GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID=... GOOGLE_CLIENT_SECRET=... \
  uv run --extra test pytest tests/test_tasks_integration.py tests/test_contacts_integration.py -v

Integration tests create their own artifacts and clean up after themselves — drafts (never sent) and Drive files for the Gmail suite, test events for the Calendar suite, a scratch task list for the Tasks suite. Nothing is left behind on success.

Local stdio Mode

--stdio starts FastMCP's stdio transport: no uvicorn, no bearer token (the client owns the spawned process; there is no network surface). This is what most interactive MCP clients should use:

// e.g. Claude Desktop claude_desktop_config.json / Claude Code .mcp.json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "google": {
      "command": "uv",
      "args": ["run", "--project", "/path/to/google-accounts-mcp",
               "google-accounts-mcp", "--stdio"],
      "env": {
        "GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID": "...",
        "GOOGLE_CLIENT_SECRET": "...",
        "TOKEN_DB_PATH": "/home/you/.local/share/google-accounts-mcp/tokens.db",
        "ATTACHMENTS_DIR": "/home/you/.local/share/google-accounts-mcp/attachments"
      }
    }
  }
}

Prefer an env file over inline values where your client supports it (uv run --env-file ...).

Container Deployment (HTTP)

podman build -t google-accounts-mcp .
podman run -d --name google-accounts-mcp -p 8321:8321 -v google-data:/data \
  -e GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID=... -e GOOGLE_CLIENT_SECRET=... \
  -e MCP_BEARER_TOKEN=some-long-random-token \
  google-accounts-mcp

The /data volume persists tokens.db and staged attachments across restarts. Authorize accounts by running scripts/authorize.py on a machine with a browser and copying tokens.db into the volume (restart the container afterwards). HTTP clients register the server as:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "google": {
      "url": "https://your-host:8321/mcp",
      "headers": {"Authorization": "Bearer <MCP_BEARER_TOKEN>"}
    }
  }
}

Terminate TLS at a reverse proxy — the server itself speaks plain HTTP. Treat tokens.db like a password vault: whoever reads it controls every connected Google account across all granted scopes (it is created with mode 0600; keep the volume private).

License

MIT