IMAP Mini MCP
My favorite workflow upgrade this week. I finally had enough of manually sifting through 100+ emails a day and creating custom rules in my email client.
I tried several email MCP servers — they were either too complex for what I needed or the AI did things I absolutely didn’t want. Like replying to emails without asking, or marking important emails as read.
So I built my own: IMAP Mini MCP — a lightweight MCP server that connects to any IMAP provider and gives AI agents read access to your inbox plus the ability to draft replies and move emails between folders.
The key design decision: no sending
Agents can read, search, organize, and compose drafts — but they cannot send anything. I don’t trust AI to send emails on my behalf (yet).
- List and search emails by time range, sender, or domain
- Fetch full email content and attachments
- Create and update draft replies with proper threading
- Organize with folder management and email moves
With this and speech-to-text, I now ask Claude each morning to fetch the last 24 hours of email and generate a complete overview of what’s new and what matters. I can then instruct the AI verbally on what replies to write, links to open, and emails to archive.