MCP Notmuch Sendmail

Status: Actively maintained and in daily use. Tested releases are published to PyPI with git tags, and issues and pull requests are triaged regularly.

Let Claude be your email assistant! MCP Notmuch Sendmail connects Claude Desktop to your notmuch email database, allowing it to:

• Search and browse your email threads
• View conversations in a clean text format
• Compose new emails using markdown
• Reply to threads with smart deduplication of quoted content
• Create beautiful emails with LaTeX-inspired styling
• Synchronize your email database by running a configured script

Uses html2text for HTML email rendering and markdown-it for composing rich HTML emails with inline images.

Installation

Ensure you have uv installed:

# Install uv if you haven't already
curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

Usage with Claude Desktop

Add to your claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "email": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["--from", "mcp-notmuch-sendmail==2026.10.15.202932", "--python", "3.10",
               "--refresh", "mcp-notmuch-sendmail"]
      "env": {
        "NOTMUCH_DATABASE_PATH": "/path/to/your/notmuch/db",
        "NOTMUCH_REPLY_SEPARATORS": "Pipe|Separated|Phrases",
        "SENDMAIL_FROM_EMAIL": "[email protected]",
        "SENDMAIL_EMAIL_SIGNATURE_HTML": "Optional HTML signature",
        "SENDMAIL_ALLOWED_UPLOAD_DIRECTORIES": "/path/to/images,/another/path",
        "NOTMUCH_SYNC_SCRIPT": "/path/to/your/sync/script.sh",
        "LOG_FILE_PATH": "/path/to/log/file.log",
        "DRAFT_DIR": "/path/for/email/drafts"
      }
    }
  }
}

Transports

By default the server speaks stdio. It can also serve over HTTP for clients that connect that way:

# Recommended HTTP transport (serves on http://HOST:PORT/mcp)
mcp-notmuch-sendmail --transport streamable-http --host 127.0.0.1 --port 8000

# Legacy SSE transport, for older clients (serves on http://HOST:PORT/sse)
mcp-notmuch-sendmail --transport sse --host 127.0.0.1 --port 8000

Environment Variables

• NOTMUCH_DATABASE_PATH: Path to your notmuch database (required)
• NOTMUCH_REPLY_SEPARATORS: Pipe-separated list of text markers - keeps email content up until the first line starting with any of these markers, removing quoted replies (required)
• SENDMAIL_FROM_EMAIL: Your email address for the From: field (optional - when unset, the email composing/sending tools are disabled and the server is read-only)
• SENDMAIL_EMAIL_SIGNATURE_HTML: HTML signature to append to emails (optional)
• SENDMAIL_ALLOWED_UPLOAD_DIRECTORIES: Comma-separated list of directories from which images referenced in markdown may be embedded into outgoing emails (optional - inline image embedding is disabled if not set)