MCP Notmuch Sendmail

Status: Works for me but is still very beta

Let Claude be your email assistant! MCP Notmuch Sendmail connects Claude Desktop to your notmuch email database, allowing it to:

Search and browse your email threads
View conversations in a clean text format
Compose new emails using markdown
Reply to threads with smart deduplication of quoted content
Create beautiful emails with LaTeX-inspired styling

Uses html2text for HTML email rendering and markdown-it for composing rich HTML emails with inline images.

Requirements

A working notmuch database setup
A configured sendmail command for sending emails
Python 3.10+

API

Tools

find_email_thread
- Find email threads in the notmuch database
- Input: notmuch_search_query (string)
- Returns tab-separated list of threads with format:
thread_id date subject authors
view_email_thread
- View all messages for an email thread
- Input: thread_id (string)
- Returns conversation in text format with HTML->text conversion
FROM: sender@example.com DATE: 2024-01-25 Message content... - - - FROM: another@example.com DATE: 2024-01-24 Earlier message...
compose_new_email
- Compose a new email draft from markdown. A signature will be automatically added if SENDMAIL_EMAIL_SIGNATURE_HTML is set.
- Inputs:
  - subject (string): Email subject
  - body_as_markdown (string): Email body in markdown
  - to (list): Recipient email addresses
  - cc (list, optional): CC recipients
  - bcc (list, optional): BCC recipients
- Creates draft files and returns paths:
Created drafts: - drafts/draft.md (edit this) - drafts/draft.html (preview)
compose_email_reply
- Compose a reply to an existing email thread. A signature will be automatically added if SENDMAIL_EMAIL_SIGNATURE_HTML is set.
- Inputs:
  - thread_id (string): Thread ID to reply to
  - subject (string): Email subject
  - body_as_markdown (string): Email body in markdown
  - to (list): Recipient email addresses
  - cc (list, optional): CC recipients
  - bcc (list, optional): BCC recipients
- Creates draft files and returns paths:
Created drafts: - drafts/draft.md (edit this) - drafts/draft.html (preview)
send_email
- Sends the composed email draft
- No input required
- Returns success/error message

Usage with Claude Desktop

Add to your claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "email": {
      "command": "uv",
      "args": ["--directory", "/path/to/mcp-notmuch-sendmail", "run", "server.py"],
      "env": {
        "NOTMUCH_DATABASE_PATH": "/path/to/your/notmuch/db",
        "NOTMUCH_REPLY_SEPARATORS": "Pipe|Separated|Phrases",
        "SENDMAIL_FROM_EMAIL": "your.email@example.com",
        "SENDMAIL_EMAIL_SIGNATURE_HTML": "<p>Optional HTML signature</p>",
        "LOG_FILE_PATH": "/path/to/log/file.log"
      }
    }
  }
}

Environment Variables:

NOTMUCH_DATABASE_PATH: Path to your notmuch database (required)
NOTMUCH_REPLY_SEPARATORS: Pipe-separated list of text markers - keeps email content up until the first line starting with any of these markers, removing quoted replies (required)
SENDMAIL_FROM_EMAIL: Your email address for the From: field (required)
SENDMAIL_EMAIL_SIGNATURE_HTML: HTML signature to append to emails (optional)
LOG_FILE_PATH: Path for logging file (optional)

Installation

Clone repository:

git clone https://github.com/runekaagaard/mcp-notmuch-sendmail.git

Ensure you have uv

# Install uv if you haven't already
curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

Add email configuration to claude_desktop_config.json (see above)

Reply Separators

The NOTMUCH_REPLY_SEPARATORS environment variable controls email reply detection. When viewing a thread, each email's content is trimmed at the first line that starts with any of the configured separators. This effectively removes quoted replies while keeping the new content.

Here are recommended separator patterns for different languages:

English

On|wrote:|From:|Sent:|To:|Subject:|Date:|Cc:|Best regards|Kind Regards|Thanks,|Thank you,|Best,|All the best|regards,|Sent from my|Get Outlook for|CAUTION:|Disclaimer:|Warning:|Confidential:|CONFIDENTIALITY:|---------- Original Message ----------

German

Am.*schrieb|Von:|Gesendet|An:|Betreff:|Datum:|Cc:|Organisation:|Mit freundlichen Grüßen|Beste Grüße|Viele Grüße|Hinweis:|Achtung:|Gesendet von

French

Le.*a écrit|De |Envoyé |À |Objet |Cc |cordialement|salutations|bonne réception|bonne journée|Envoyé depuis

Dutch

Op.*schreef:|Van:|Verzonden|Aan:|Onderwerp:|Datum:|Cc:|Met vriendelijke groet|Hartelijke groeten|Bedankt,|Dank u,|Verzonden vanaf

Italian

Il.*ha scritto:|Da:|Inviato|A:|Oggetto:|Data:|Cc:|Cordiali saluti|Inviato da

Note: Use | (pipe) to separate patterns. These are simplified patterns derived from common email clients - you may need to adjust them based on your specific needs.

Contributing

Contributions are warmly welcomed! Whether it's bug reports, feature requests, documentation improvements, or code contributions - all input is valuable. Feel free to:

Open an issue to report bugs or suggest features
Submit pull requests with improvements
Enhance documentation or share your usage examples
Ask questions and share your experiences

The goal is to make email management with Claude even better, and your insights and contributions help achieve that.

Acknowledgments

This project builds on the excellent work of others:

mail-parser-reply - For the comprehensive email reply marker patterns
notmuch - The fast mail indexing and search engine
html2text - For converting HTML emails to readable text
markdown-it-py - For generating beautiful HTML emails
latex.css - For the LaTeX-style email formatting

License

Mozilla Public License Version 2.0

MCP Notmuch Sendmail

Integrations

MCP Notmuch Sendmail

Requirements

API

Tools

Usage with Claude Desktop

Installation

Reply Separators

English

German

French

Dutch

Italian

Contributing

Acknowledgments

License

Related Resources