GetMCP 1.5.0 — Your Mailbox, as MCP Tools

Every GetMCP release so far has been about turning APIs into MCP tools. 1.5.0 does something different: it connects the one system almost everyone lives in all day, and which has no convenient API at all. Point GetMCP at an IMAP mailbox and your AI client gets 15 tools to read, search, send, file and reply to your email.

A connector, not an API wrapper

Most templates in GetMCP wrap an HTTP API: each tool has an endpoint and its own authentication. The Mailbox template is a connector — its tools speak IMAP and SMTP directly, and you configure the connection once on the server rather than per tool.

Setup is two steps. Install Mailbox (IMAP) from Templates, then open the new server and fill in Settings → Mailbox. Pick your provider and the servers, ports and folder names are filled in for you — Gmail, Outlook and Microsoft 365, Yahoo, Fastmail, Zoho, or a cPanel box of your own. Enter your username and password, hit Test connection, and it reports how many folders it found and how many messages are in your inbox.

One thing that trips everyone up on the first try: Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo will reject your normal account password. You need an app password from your mail account’s security settings. It’s the single most common reason a connection test fails, and the test tells you so rather than making you guess.

Your password is encrypted with your installation’s own key and stored in your own database. Mail moves directly between your server and your mail provider. Nothing passes through getmcp.com — the same as every other server you build here.

Nothing that sends or deletes is on by default

Connecting a mailbox should never be the moment an AI silently gains write access to it. So the template installs 15 tools and enables 5 — the ones that only read:

• list_emails — recent messages from a folder
• search_emails — by sender, recipient, subject, body or date range
• read_email — one message in full, attachments listed
• list_folders — the exact folder names to use
• find_unsubscribe — how to leave the list a message came from

Everything that sends, moves or deletes — send_email, save_draft, mark_email, flag_email, move_email, delete_email, create_folder, delete_folder and the two unsubscribe actions — arrives switched off. You turn on the ones you want from the Tools tab, individually, and a disabled tool isn’t advertised to the AI at all.

A sensible starting point: enable sending, drafts, marking read and moving; leave the deleting tools off until you trust the setup.

What it’s actually like

Once the server is active and your AI client is connected, the mailbox is just there in the conversation:

• “What came in overnight that I haven’t read?”
• “Find the invoice thread with Northwind and tell me what we agreed.”
• “Draft a reply to Amelia confirming Thursday — don’t send it, I want to read it first.”
• “File everything from that sender into Clients/Northwind.”

Two details make replies behave the way you’d expect rather than technically-correct-but-annoying. send_email and save_draft both take the message being answered, and GetMCP copies the In-Reply-To and References headers across — so the reply lands in the existing thread instead of starting a new one, and the original gets flagged answered the way a mail client would. And reading a message doesn’t mark it read unless you ask, so your unread count stays meaningful.

Getting off a mailing list, without opening the email

Three of the fifteen tools exist for one job: leaving a list properly rather than guessing.

find_unsubscribe reads the List-Unsubscribe headers the sender published, and falls back to scanning the message body when there aren’t any. It returns every route it found, best first, and says how much each one is worth: a one-click route is guaranteed by the sender, a header route is published by them, and a link scraped from the body is a good guess.

Then one of two tools takes it. unsubscribe_via_link calls the link — and where the sender supports one-click unsubscribe (RFC 8058), it sends the exact request they committed to honouring, so the removal is complete when the call returns. send_unsubscribe_email covers the lists that only accept mail, sending from your connected mailbox because that’s the address the list matches you against.

An unsubscribe URL carries an identifier for you, so the link tool is deliberately fussy about what it will call: HTTPS only unless you override it, no links resolving to private or internal addresses, no URLs with credentials embedded, and redirects followed by hand with every hop re-checked. Both acting tools install disabled — find_unsubscribe on its own is useful even if you’d rather click the links yourself.

Mailboxes are big; the tools now admit it

list_emails and search_emails return at most 100 messages at a time, and each response now carries how many matched in total, whether there are more, and where to continue. So “summarise everything from this sender since January” works through the whole set instead of quietly stopping at the first hundred.

Already built a mailbox server?

Tools are written as rows when a server is created, so a server built before a tool existed would never gain it — and rebuilding it would mean re-entering your credentials and losing whatever you’d enabled. Instead, open the server and look at Settings → Mailbox: a notice lists what’s new, marks which of them write to the mailbox, and offers to add them. Your connection and the tools you’d already enabled or disabled are left exactly as they were, and anything that writes arrives switched off, just like a fresh install. Or click Skip and it won’t ask again.

Also in 1.5.0

Removing a site from your licence on your account page now takes effect on that site straight away. Previously the site kept working until its next licence check — which could be days. Now the account page and the site agree immediately.

Getting 1.5.0

If you’re on the WordPress plugin, the update is waiting in your dashboard. On the standalone app, System Status will offer it, or update from the command line:

curl -fsSL https://get.getmcp.com | bash -s -- --update --dir=/path/to/getmcp

Both builds are the same codebase, so the mailbox connector behaves identically on either. The full list of changes is on the changelog, and if you hit anything odd, support is the fastest way to reach us.