mcp-telegram

MCP server for Telegram — let AI assistants interact with your Telegram account

Features

• Chat Management: List, search, mute/unmute chats, organize into folders

• Messages: Read, search, inspect context, send, draft, schedule, link-resolve, and backup messages

• AI Summarization: Summarize chat conversations using multiple LLM providers

• Secure: Session stored in macOS Keychain (file-based storage on Linux/Windows)

• Two transports: local stdio (single account) or remote streamable HTTP with an embedded OAuth 2.1 server and per-user Telegram QR login — multi-user and deployable to Cloud Run (see Remote (HTTP) Mode)

Related MCP server: Better Telegram MCP

Installation

go install github.com/tolmachov/mcp-telegram@latest

Or build from source:

git clone https://github.com/tolmachov/mcp-telegram.git
cd mcp-telegram
make

Setup

1. Get Telegram API Credentials

1. Go to my.telegram.org/apps

2. Create an application

3. Copy api_id and api_hash

2. Configure Environment

Store credentials (macOS Keychain; plaintext JSON at ~/.local/state/mcp-telegram/config.json with 0600 perms on Linux/Windows):

mcp-telegram config set api-id 123456789
mcp-telegram config set api-hash abcd1234efgh5678

Or use a .env file:

cp .env.example .env
# Edit .env with your credentials

3. Login to Telegram

mcp-telegram login --phone +1234567890

You'll be prompted for a verification code sent to your Telegram.

4. Configure MCP Client

Claude Desktop

Add to ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json (macOS) or %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json (Windows):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "telegram": {
      "command": "mcp-telegram",
      "args": ["run"],
      "env": {
        "TELEGRAM_API_ID": "your_api_id",
        "TELEGRAM_API_HASH": "your_api_hash"
      }
    }
  }
}

Claude Code

claude mcp add telegram -- /path/to/mcp-telegram run

Set environment variables in your .env file or pass them via --env.

Available Tools

29 tools exposed to MCP clients. Messages are identified by opaque string handles ("42" for regular, "s:42" for scheduled) — copy them back verbatim from tool outputs to follow-up calls, never parse or construct them manually.

If your client shows a single tool called TelegramLoginRequired and none of the tools below, the server is up but Telegram is not authorized — see When Telegram Isn't Authorized.

Server Variants

The server implements experimental server variants (SEP-2053): one server that offers several selectable capability sets. A client sends hints during initialize, the server ranks the variants, and the client picks one. Clients that don't understand the extension transparently get the full variant, so nothing changes for them.

Pin a single variant with --variant (or TELEGRAM_VARIANT) for clients that can't negotiate — e.g. --variant research exposes only the read-only subset:

mcp-telegram run --variant research

Leave it unset to expose all three and let the client choose.

Note on pinned-chat resources. In multi-variant mode (no --variant), pinned-chat resources are exposed on every variant and kept fresh by a single poller, but proactive resources/list_changed notifications are not delivered — the variants proxy can't forward the background watcher's notifications (an upstream library limitation). Clients pick up pin changes on their next resources/list. Pin a single --variant to restore live notifications.

Available Resources

Pinned chat resources are created dynamically for each pinned chat and refreshed in the background; clients receive resources/list_changed when the set changes (except in multi-variant mode — see the note under Server Variants).

Available Prompts

3 parameterized prompts that MCP clients expose as slash-commands or quick actions.

Prompt Examples

Here are some example prompts you can use with AI assistants:

Message Management

• "Check for any unread important messages in my Telegram"

• "Summarize all my unread Telegram messages"

• "Read and analyze my unread messages, prepare draft responses where needed"

• "Check non-critical unread messages and give me a brief overview"

• "Find messages mentioning 'invoice' in my work chat from last week"

• "Open the context around this Telegram link: https://t.me/example/123"

Organization

• "Analyze my Telegram dialogs and suggest a folder structure"

• "Help me categorize my Telegram chats by importance"

• "Find all work-related conversations and suggest how to organize them"

Communication

• "Monitor specific chat for updates about [topic]"

• "Draft a polite response to the last message in [chat]"

• "Check if there are any unanswered questions in my chats"

• "Resolve this Telegram message link and show me the thread context"

Backup & Export

• "Backup my conversation with [contact] to a file"

• "Export the last week of messages from [group]"

• "Backup media-only updates too so nothing is silently skipped"

Chat Summarization

The SummarizeChat tool supports multiple LLM providers:

• sampling (experimental): Uses the MCP client's LLM via MCP Sampling. Only works with clients that support sampling: VS Code, fast-agent, Continue. Does NOT work with Claude Desktop or Claude Code.

• ollama: Local LLM via Ollama - no API key required

• gemini: Google Gemini API

• anthropic: Anthropic Claude API

Configure via environment variables:

SUMMARIZE_PROVIDER=ollama  # or: sampling, gemini, anthropic
SUMMARIZE_MODEL=           # provider-specific model name

Commands

# Run MCP server (used by MCP clients)
mcp-telegram run

# Login to Telegram
mcp-telegram login --phone +1234567890

# Logout and delete session
mcp-telegram logout

# Securely store config values (macOS Keychain / file on Linux)
mcp-telegram config set api-id 123456789
mcp-telegram config set api-hash abcd1234

# List stored keys
mcp-telegram config list

# Delete a stored value
mcp-telegram config delete api-id

Allowed keys: api-id, api-hash, anthropic, gemini.

Credentials resolve in this priority order (higher wins): CLI flags (--api-id, --api-hash) → environment variables (including .env) → secure store values set via config set. This lets you keep stable values in the keychain and override per-run from the command line without editing the store.

Configuration Options

Remote (HTTP) Mode

By default the server speaks the stdio transport: one local process, one Telegram account, driven by a desktop MCP client. It can instead run as a long-lived remote server over the MCP streamable HTTP transport, so a single hosted deployment serves many users — each authenticating with their own Telegram account — over the network.

How authorization works

Authorization is pure Telegram — no bots, no external identity provider. The server embeds a small OAuth 2.1 authorization server (Dynamic Client Registration + PKCE); when a client connects it opens the authorization page, which shows a QR code. You scan it with the Telegram app (Settings → Devices → Link Desktop Device), and the resulting MTProto session both proves who you are and becomes your working session (a 2FA-password prompt appears if your account has one). Only Telegram user ids listed in AUTH_ALLOWED_USERS may complete the login — everyone else is rejected after the scan and their session is discarded.

Each authorization is an independent session: it gets its own encrypted object in the bucket and its own MCP server assembly, so one account can be logged in from several clients at once without them contending. The server keeps up to a few of an account's assemblies warm concurrently; an account actively switching between more sessions than that is not rejected but pays a brief Telegram reconnect when an idle one is rebuilt on demand. Sessions are encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM under a split key: the key is derived from both AUTH_TOKEN_KEY and a random per-session key that lives only inside the client's OAuth access/refresh token (never stored server-side). As a result, an at-rest dump of the bucket plus the secret manager cannot, on its own, decrypt a session — a live token is also required. (Trade-offs, stated plainly: this does not protect against a compromise of the running server's memory. And because the per-session key share travels inside the token, an attacker who holds the bucket and the master key and captures one access token can decrypt that single session — and thereby extract its persistent MTProto auth key, which outlives the ≤55-minute token and keeps working until the session is revoked or logged out. That exposure is confined to the one captured session; other sessions stay protected. TLS, Cache-Control: no-store on token/revoke responses, and never logging tokens narrow the capture window.) Pre-existing sessions from older versions stay readable with the master key alone and are transparently upgraded to a split-key session on their next token refresh.

Session lifecycle is managed automatically: POST /revoke (RFC 7009) with an access or refresh token durably marks that authorization revoked (a tombstone stored where the Telegram client never writes) and deletes its session. The refresh grant dies immediately and stays dead — even if a still-live client re-stores the session object, the refresh check consults the tombstone, so revocation cannot be undone by a resurrected blob. An already-issued access token remains valid until it expires (≤55 minutes): revocation reliably stops renewal, matching the standard short-lived-access / revocable-refresh model. Revocation does not terminate the Telegram-side device authorization (it stays in Settings → Devices until Telegram expires it). Sessions abandoned without revocation — and old tombstones — are reclaimed by a background sweep once older than the refresh-token TTL plus a day, past which no refresh token for the session can still be valid.

Legacy (pre-split-key) sessions are upgraded on their next token refresh by moving the session to a fresh split-key object and revoking the old legacy session. Consequently, if one account was logged in from several clients before upgrading, the first client to refresh wins the upgrade and the others re-run the QR login on their next refresh — this avoids ever running two Telegram clients on one auth key (which would trip AUTH_KEY_DUPLICATED).

Try it locally

# Issuer on loopback may use plain http:
mcp-telegram run --transport http --http-addr :8080 \
  --auth telegram \
  --auth-issuer-url http://localhost:8080 \
  --auth-allowed-users 123456789 \
  --auth-token-key "$(head -c 32 /dev/urandom | base64)" \
  --auth-session-dir ~/.local/state/mcp-telegram/http-sessions

Then point an MCP client at http://localhost:8080/ and complete the browser flow. --auth none (the default for HTTP) serves plain streamable HTTP with no authentication — only safe behind a trusted proxy. Use * as the sole entry in --auth-allowed-users to allow any Telegram account (the deployment is then only as private as its URL; * cannot be combined with specific ids).

Deploy to Google Cloud Run

The production target is Cloud Run: one container, scale-to-zero, secrets from Secret Manager, sessions in a GCS bucket. In outline:

1. Create a bucket for the encrypted per-user sessions and a dedicated service account with roles/storage.objectAdmin on just that bucket.

2. Store two secrets in Secret Manager — the Telegram api_hash and a freshly generated 32-byte AUTH_TOKEN_KEY (head -c 32 /dev/urandom | base64) — and grant the service account roles/secretmanager.secretAccessor on them. The token key never leaves Secret Manager in plaintext. Losing it logs everyone out (sessions become undecryptable). Leaking it alone no longer exposes split-key sessions — those also need a live client token — but treat it as highly sensitive regardless: it still mints tokens and decrypts any not-yet-upgraded legacy sessions.

3. Deploy with gcloud run deploy --source ., wiring the non-secret env from deploy/cloudrun.env.example, the two secrets via --set-secrets, and --max-instances=1 (mandatory: two instances loading the same MTProto session trip Telegram's AUTH_KEY_DUPLICATED and forcibly log every user out).

4. Set AUTH_ISSUER_URL to the service URL and redeploy — tokens and session encryption are bound to the issuer value.

Copy-paste commands, the exact IAM bindings, the token/revocation model, and how to connect claude.ai / Claude Desktop / Claude Code are in deploy/README.md.

Destructive Actions

Tools like DeleteMessage request user confirmation via MCP elicitation before proceeding. If your MCP client does not support elicitation, the server proceeds automatically without a confirmation dialog.

When Telegram Isn't Authorized

Telegram sessions expire and can be revoked from Settings → Devices → Active sessions on any of your devices. When that happens — or when api-id/api-hash are missing — the server does not fail its MCP connection. Over stdio it comes up in login-required mode:

• the host shows the server as connected, exposing a single tool named TelegramLoginRequired and no Telegram tools at all;

• the server instructions tell the model Telegram is unavailable and what the fix is, so the first Telegram request you make gets answered with the real reason instead of a generic failure;

• calling TelegramLoginRequired re-checks the live state and reports not_configured, login_required, check_failed, or authorized_pending_reconnect — the last one meaning you logged in elsewhere and only need to reconnect the server.

The fix is the usual one. Use the path your host actually launches — the binary is typically wired in by absolute path and not on $PATH, which is why the tool's fix_command field hands back a paste-ready command with the real path already filled in:

/path/to/mcp-telegram login --phone +1234567890
# then reconnect the MCP server (in Claude Code: /mcp → select this server → Reconnect)

This is deliberate. A stdio server that refuses its MCP connection is rendered by hosts as a bare "failed" entry with the reason buried in a log file, indistinguishable from a bad binary path — so the diagnosis is delivered as server content instead, which is the only channel a stdio server has. Two paths keep fail-fast behaviour, because they have no MCP peer to tell:

• the HTTP transport — the process exits non-zero so Cloud Run sees an unhealthy start rather than a listener it can never serve;

• stdin attached to a TTY, i.e. you ran mcp-telegram run yourself — the message goes to stderr and the process exits, which is what makes that command usable as a manual smoke test.

Note the boundary is the TTY, not "a human started it": with stdin piped or redirected from a file, mcp-telegram run serves login-required mode and exits 0 on EOF. Scripted health checks should call mcp-telegram login/config list, or assert on the tool list, rather than on run's exit status.

In remote (HTTP) mode none of this applies: a dead per-user session is answered with 401 plus a WWW-Authenticate challenge, which sends the MCP client back through OAuth and its QR login to mint a fresh session — no restart, no CLI.

Session Storage

• macOS: Stored securely in Keychain.

• Linux/Windows: Stored in ~/.local/state/mcp-telegram/session.json with 0600 file permissions. The file is plaintext — keep the containing user account trusted, and prefer running on macOS when handling sensitive accounts.

Config values set via mcp-telegram config set (API keys, Telegram credentials) follow the same backend: Keychain on macOS, plaintext JSON on Linux/Windows.

Note on the plaintext store (Linux/Windows): the session file grants full access to your Telegram account. Place it on an encrypted filesystem (LUKS/BitLocker) and do not sync ~/.local/state/mcp-telegram (or ~/.config) to an unencrypted cloud backup — a leaked session.json is equivalent to a leaked login.

Development

make build            # build the binary with version metadata
make lint             # golangci-lint
make test             # unit tests
make test-integration # end-to-end tests (need a real account + TEST_* vars)

Unit tests run without credentials. The integration suite in test/ is behind the integration build tag and drives the server over a real stdio pipe using a second MCP implementation (mark3labs/mcp-go) as the client, to catch wire-level interop issues. It reads the TEST_* variables documented in .env.example (e.g. TEST_CHAT_ID, TEST_GROUP_ID) and skips any test whose variable or Telegram credentials are unset.

License

MIT