Skip to content

Apple Mail MCP

The only Apple Mail MCP server with full-coverage FTS5 body search. Reliable on large mailboxes where AppleScript-based servers timeout — with 8 tools for reading, searching, and extracting email content. Also works as a standalone CLI.

Why Apple Mail MCP?

Tested against 8 other Apple Mail MCP servers on a real ~72K-message mailbox:

  • Only server with full-coverage body search. Most competitors don't support body search at all; the one that does (BastianZim) caps at the 5000 most recent messages — silent miss on older mail. Our FTS5 covers the entire mailbox.
  • ~3ms single email fetch via disk-first .emlx reading.
  • ~7ms subject search via FTS5 — competitive with native Rust on the same operation.
  • Reliable across all 6 benchmarked operations at this mailbox size — AppleScript-based servers timeout, throw syntax errors, or skip operations.

Capability Matrix

Key Features

  • 8 MCP tools + CLI — search, read, list, extract attachments and links — usable as MCP server or standalone CLI
  • Unified filtering — unread, flagged, today, last 7 days
  • FTS5 search index — full-text body search in ~2ms with BM25 ranking
  • Real-time updates — --watch flag for automatic index updates
  • Disk-first sync — fast filesystem scanning instead of slow JXA queries
  • Type-safe — full Python type hints with PEP 561 py.typed marker

Quick Install

# No install required — run directly
pipx run apple-mail-mcp

# Or install globally
pipx install apple-mail-mcp

Claude Desktop Setup

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "mail": {
      "command": "apple-mail-mcp"
    }
  }
}

That's it. Ask Claude to search your emails, get today's messages, or find unread mail.

CLI Usage (No MCP Required)

All tools also work as standalone CLI commands:

apple-mail-mcp search "quarterly report" --after 2026-01-01
apple-mail-mcp read 12345
apple-mail-mcp emails --filter unread --limit 10

Generate a Claude Code skill for CLI-based access:

apple-mail-mcp integrate claude > ~/.claude/skills/apple-mail.md

Next Steps