IMAP-MCP lets Claude sort a 300K-email inbox via local cache
Anton Bukarev built IMAP-MCP, a tool that connects AI assistants like Claude to email via standard IMAP with a local cache, and used it to sort roughly 200,000 emails in a single afternoon.
Score breakdown
IMAP-MCP demonstrates a practical MCP integration pattern — local caching plus OS-keychain credential storage — that makes large-scale, AI-driven email management fast and secure without exposing credentials or hammering mail servers.
- 01Anton Bukarev built IMAP-MCP after no existing tool could handle his 300,000-email inbox.
- 02IMAP-MCP downloads emails into a local cache so all queries run instantly, with no server roundtrips or timeouts.
- 03Claude analyzed the inbox and found only 3% of emails were from real humans; 40% were monitoring alerts.
Anton Bukarev built IMAP-MCP to solve a problem existing tools couldn't: managing a 300,000-email inbox with an AI assistant. Prior solutions either timed out on large mailboxes, made a server roundtrip on every query, or required passwords in plaintext config files. IMAP-MCP works by downloading emails into a local cache once, after which all searches and operations run instantly — searching 100,000 emails takes seconds with no server dependency.
He asked Claude to analyze senders from the last six months and received a breakdown: 40% monitoring alerts, 15% GitHub notifications, 10% shopping, 8% LinkedIn, and only 3% messages from actual humans.
Bukarev walked through several concrete use cases. He asked Claude to analyze senders from the last six months and received a breakdown: 40% monitoring alerts, 15% GitHub notifications, 10% shopping, 8% LinkedIn, and only 3% messages from actual humans. Claude then proposed and created 12 folders — including Dev, Shopping, Newsletters, LinkedIn, Finance, and Travel — and sorted roughly 200,000 emails over a few sessions. He also used it to locate a buried IEEE reviewer panel invitation in 2 seconds, run a weekly review of unanswered threads (surfacing 12 emails with one-line summaries in one instance), and generate reply drafts saved to his Drafts folder for manual review before sending. A dry-run mode lets users preview bulk operations before committing; one run matched 3,000 emails that were then processed in minutes.
On the technical side, IMAP-MCP works with any IMAP-compatible provider — Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, Exchange, or self-hosted. Credentials are stored in the OS keychain (macOS Keychain, Windows Credential Locker, or Linux secret service), not in a config file. Cache encryption is optional. The tool is compatible with Claude Code, Claude Desktop, VS Code, Cursor, and Windsurf — anything that speaks MCP.
Key facts
- 01Anton Bukarev built IMAP-MCP after no existing tool could handle his 300,000-email inbox.
- 02IMAP-MCP downloads emails into a local cache so all queries run instantly, with no server roundtrips or timeouts.
- 03Claude analyzed the inbox and found only 3% of emails were from real humans; 40% were monitoring alerts.
- 04Claude created 12 folders and sorted roughly 200,000 emails over a few sessions in one afternoon.
- 05A dry-run mode previews bulk operations before committing; one preview matched 3,000 emails.
- 06Credentials are stored in the OS keychain — not in a plaintext config file — and cache encryption is optional.