mailwarden

A reliable, native Gmail MCP server — full mailbox triage for AI assistants, with the feature nobody else ships: snooze.

Highlights

• Snooze — the feature nobody else ships. Archive a thread now, have it resurface in the inbox on a date. Built on dated labels + a sweep, so it works from any client and survives restarts.
• Search you can trust. Gmail's own search index silently drops is:unread in some operator combinations — search re-verifies every hit against its live labels and discards the index's false positives. Paginated via pageToken/nextPageToken.
• Bulk operations that scale. bulk_modify archives/labels everything matching a query at 1000 messages per API request — with per-chunk partial-success reporting instead of all-or-nothing. The snooze sweep uses the same batch path.
• Structured outputs. Every tool declares an outputSchema and returns validated structuredContent alongside fenced JSON text — no parsing guesswork for clients.
• Small attack surface. No send tools (no exfiltration path for prompt-injected mail), optional read-only mode, no telemetry, no open ports by default, symlink-safe download fencing, injection-fenced output. Details under Security & privacy.
• Correct with real-world mail. RFC 2047 headers decoded (=?UTF-8?B?…?= → readable text), bodies decoded in their declared charset (no mojibake for ISO-8859-1/Shift_JIS mail), 429/5xx retried with exponential backoff.

Why

Connectors that sync or cache your mailbox can lag behind it — and even Gmail's own search index is sometimes loose (see below). mailwarden talks straight to the live Gmail API (no cached snapshot) and re-verifies what the index returns, so what you see is what's actually there. It's a generic Gmail capability layer — keep your own rules/logic in your AI client, not in the server.

search goes one step further than the raw API: Gmail's threads.list index is sometimes loose for read-state operators — is:unread is silently dropped in some operator combinations (e.g. category:updates is:unread -in:inbox returns read mail too). Since every hit is fetched live anyway, search re-checks the unambiguous predicates (is:unread/is:read/is:starred/in:inbox/category:…, with negation) against each thread's true labels and drops the index's false positives.

Tools

Tool	What it does
search	Gmail query syntax → thread summaries (from/subject/date/labels/snippet); read-state/category predicates are re-verified against each hit's live labels; paginated via pageToken/nextPageToken
get_thread	Full thread: headers, plaintext + HTML bodies, attachment metadata
list_labels	All labels (system + user)
modify_labels	Add/remove labels (archive = remove INBOX, read = remove UNREAD)
bulk_modify	Batch label changes for every message matching a query — 1000 messages per API request, partial success reported per chunk (thread-id list capped at 500, modifiedThreadCount has the total)
archive / mark_read / mark_unread	Convenience wrappers
trash / untrash	Move to / restore from Trash
download_attachment	Save an attachment to a local path (never overwrites — collisions get a numeric suffix)
snooze	Archive now, resurface on/after a date (YYYY-MM-DD)
unsnooze	Cancel a snooze, return to inbox now
list_snoozed	All snoozed threads + due dates
sweep_snoozed	Resurface threads whose snooze is due (run on demand, via cron, or the daemon); batched, with partial-failure reporting

All tools declare an outputSchema and return structured content (validated, machine-readable) alongside the same JSON as fenced text — clients never have to parse prose.

How snooze works (no Gmail API snooze exists — we build it)

snooze removes INBOX and applies a dated label MCP/Snoozed/<YYYY-MM-DD>. sweep_snoozed finds due labels and returns those threads to the inbox (marked unread). Run the sweep:

• on demand (sweep_snoozed tool),
• via cron: mailwarden --sweep,
• or automatically: set MAILWARDEN_AUTO_SWEEP=1 (hourly sweep while the server runs).

Security & privacy

• No telemetry. Nothing phones home — no analytics, no crash reporting, no tracking.
• No open ports by default. stdio only; an HTTP listener exists solely behind an explicit --http, optionally gated by a MAILWARDEN_TOKEN bearer token.
• No send tools — by design. mailwarden cannot compose, reply, or forward. A prompt-injected instruction inside an email has no exfiltration path through this server.
• Read-only mode. Set MAILWARDEN_READONLY=1 and only the read tools (search, get_thread, list_labels, list_snoozed) are registered — nothing that can change the mailbox or write files is even advertised to clients. Recommended for shared/HTTP deployments that only triage.
• Fenced downloads. With MAILWARDEN_DOWNLOAD_DIR set, attachment writes are confined to that directory (realpath-canonicalized, symlink-aware) and never overwrite an existing file.
• Untrusted-content fencing. Every tool result is wrapped in <untrusted-tool-output> markers and stripped of invisible/BiDi-override characters, so clients can tell quoted mail content from instructions.
• Live API, no copy. No mailbox mirror or search index is stored anywhere. The only local state is your OAuth token in ~/.mailwarden/.

Quick start

claude mcp add mailwarden -- npx -y mailwarden

That's the whole install — npx fetches and runs the published package, no clone or build step. You only need Google OAuth credentials once (below).

Setup

First time setting up a Google OAuth app? Follow the step-by-step setup guide — it walks through the Google Cloud Console with exact click paths, explains the "unverified app" screen, and covers the trap that makes tokens die after 7 days. The short version:

1. Google Cloud: create a project → enable the Gmail API → configure the OAuth consent screen and publish it to Production (in Testing status, Google expires refresh tokens after 7 days) → create an OAuth client ID of type Desktop app → download it as credentials.json.
2. Put credentials.json in ~/.mailwarden/ (or set MAILWARDEN_CREDENTIALS=/path/to/credentials.json).
3. Authorize once — opens a browser, stores a refresh token in ~/.mailwarden/token.json:

   npx -y mailwarden --auth
   

   Scope requested: https://www.googleapis.com/auth/gmail.modify.

Connect

Claude Code (local stdio):

claude mcp add mailwarden -- npx -y mailwarden

Claude Desktop — add to claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "mailwarden": { "command": "npx", "args": ["-y", "mailwarden"] }
  }
}

Remote (Streamable HTTP) — for a VPS / claude.ai custom connector:

npx -y mailwarden --http     # listens on :8787/mcp ; set PORT, optional MAILWARDEN_TOKEN bearer gate

Then in claude.ai: Settings → Connectors → Add custom connector → your https://your-host/mcp URL. In Claude Code: claude mcp add --transport http mailwarden https://your-host/mcp.

From source

git clone https://github.com/csitte/mailwarden && cd mailwarden
npm install && npm run build
node dist/index.js --auth

Config (env)

Var	Meaning
MAILWARDEN_DIR	config dir (default ~/.mailwarden)
MAILWARDEN_CREDENTIALS	path to credentials.json
MAILWARDEN_AUTO_SWEEP	1 → snooze sweep at startup + hourly while running
MAILWARDEN_DOWNLOAD_DIR	restrict download_attachment to this directory (strongly recommended for HTTP hosting)
MAILWARDEN_READONLY	1 → register only the read tools (search/get_thread/list_labels/list_snoozed)
PORT	HTTP port (default 8787)
MAILWARDEN_TOKEN	optional bearer token for the HTTP endpoint

Status

Working and used in daily mailbox automation. Core Gmail tools + snooze implemented against googleapis, covered by a vitest suite (116 tests, ~99 % statement coverage — npm run coverage). Current version: see the npm badge above, the changelog, or releases. PRs welcome.

License

MIT © C.Sitte Softwaretechnik