mbox-mcpSAFE

An MCP server for local email archives. Point it at a Google Takeout .mbox export or a folder of .eml files and ask Claude things like:

• "Who did I email most in this archive?"
• "Find the message where the landlord mentioned the lease renewal."
• "Summarize my correspondence with [email protected] from early 2026."

Everything stays on your machine. No OAuth, no app passwords, no IMAP connection, no cloud. Every other email MCP server connects to a live account — this one reads the archive files you already have, which is exactly what you want for the 15 years of Gmail sitting in a Takeout export.

Quick start

Claude Code

claude mcp add mbox -- npx -y mbox-mcp

Claude Desktop — add to claude_desktop_config.json:

{
"mcpServers": {
"mbox": {
"command": "npx",
"args": ["-y", "mbox-mcp"]
}
}
}

Then: "Open C:\\Takeout\\Mail\\All mail Including Spam and Trash.mbox and tell me about it."

Tools

Built for large archives

A Takeout mbox is often multiple gigabytes with 100k+ messages. The design reads the minimum, lazily:

• Streaming index — one pass in 8 MiB chunks, recording byte offsets; only the current message's first 16 KiB is ever held for envelope parsing (sender, subject, date, RFC 2047 decoding).
• Full MIME on demand — reading a message parses just that message (postal-mime: nested multipart, charsets, quoted-printable/base64). Attachments are listed with names and sizes, never dumped into context.
• Honest body search — body_query o