Busymail

Connect an AI client to your email over MCP

Busymail is an email client for the IMAP accounts you already have, and it exposes them over MCP. Point an AI client at it - Claude, or anything else that speaks MCP - and it can read your mail, search it, tidy it up, and write replies for you. It is not a mailbox you move to: you keep your accounts where they are.

Nothing sends without you

A token can never send mail. When an assistant writes a reply, the message is queued and waits under Approvals in Busymail until you approve or reject it, with the recipients, subject and body all there to read first. Approving happens while you are signed in, so the token that wrote a message cannot approve it.

What a token may do

You pick the access when you create a token.

• Read - message content, summaries, search and sent mail. Every token has this.
• Organise - archive, unarchive, pin and unpin. Archiving really moves the mail out of your inbox on your mail server, so it changes what you see in every other mail app too.
• Send - queues mail for you to approve. It also reads everything already queued on your account, whichever client queued it, so a token with this access sees the recipients, subject and body of those messages.

No token can change your settings, your password or your two-factor, add or remove an email account, or create and revoke tokens. Those stay with you. You can revoke a token at any time without affecting the others.

Connecting a client

Add this to your client as an MCP server, with one of your tokens in place of the placeholder:

It runs a small script from Busymail on your own machine, which is what lets you attach a file by giving its path: the script reads the file from disk and sends it on, so the contents never pass through the AI client. The script is fetched each time your client starts the server, so it always matches Busymail and nothing is cached. It reads whatever file a tool call names, so treat a tool call that attaches one as you would any other access to your files.

It needs Node, curl and a POSIX shell, so on Windows use the direct connection below instead.

If your client cannot run a local script

Point it at https://busymail.app/mcp as a Streamable HTTP MCP server and send the token in an Authorization: Bearer header. Everything works except attaching a file by path: the AI client has to write the file out as base64 itself, which limits attachments well below the size Busymail accepts.

Getting a token

Tokens live in Busymail under Settings, MCP. You need an account to create one, and Busymail is invite-only right now - request access and we will get you set up.