apple-mail-mcp 0.1.6

Fast MCP server for Apple Mail with FTS5 search index

Apple Mail MCP

A fast MCP server for Apple Mail — 87x faster email fetching via batch JXA, plus an FTS5 search index for 700–3500x faster body search (~2ms vs ~7s).

Read the docs for the full guide.

Quick Start

pipx install apple-mail-mcp

Add to your MCP client:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "mail": {
      "command": "apple-mail-mcp"
    }
  }
}

Build the Search Index (Recommended)

# Requires Full Disk Access for Terminal
# System Settings → Privacy & Security → Full Disk Access → Add Terminal

apple-mail-mcp index --verbose

Tools

Tool	Purpose
list_accounts()	List email accounts
list_mailboxes(account?)	List mailboxes
get_emails(filter?, limit?)	Get emails — all, unread, flagged, today, this_week
get_email(message_id)	Get single email with full content + attachments
search(query, scope?)	Search — all, subject, sender, body, attachments
get_attachment(message_id, filename)	Extract attachment content (base64)

Performance

Scenario	Apple Mail MCP	Best alternative	Speedup
Search (subject)	9ms	167ms	18x faster
Search (body)	25ms	unsupported	Only one
List accounts	125ms	138ms	Fastest

Benchmarked against 5 other Apple Mail MCP servers at the MCP protocol level.

Configuration

Variable	Default	Description
APPLE_MAIL_DEFAULT_ACCOUNT	First account	Default email account
APPLE_MAIL_DEFAULT_MAILBOX	INBOX	Default mailbox
APPLE_MAIL_INDEX_PATH	~/.apple-mail-mcp/index.db	Index location
APPLE_MAIL_INDEX_MAX_EMAILS	5000	Max emails indexed per mailbox
APPLE_MAIL_INDEX_EXCLUDE_MAILBOXES	Drafts	Mailboxes to skip in search

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "mail": {
      "command": "apple-mail-mcp",
      "args": ["--watch"],
      "env": {
        "APPLE_MAIL_DEFAULT_ACCOUNT": "Work"
      }
    }
  }
}

Migrating from apple-mcp?

If you used supermemoryai/apple-mcp (archived January 2026), apple-mail-mcp is a maintained alternative for the Mail portion specifically. Notes, Messages, Contacts, Calendar, and Reminders are out of scope.

apple-mcp (mail tool, action)	apple-mail-mcp
read_emails	get_emails(filter?, limit?) + get_email(message_id)
search_emails	search(query, scope?) — 5 scopes: all, subject, sender, body, attachments
send_email	Not yet supported (planned)

What's different: available on PyPI (pipx install apple-mail-mcp), 87x faster email fetching via batch JXA, FTS5 search index for ~2ms body search, and disk-based sync that avoids the JXA timeouts and false-success responses.

Development

git clone https://github.com/imdinu/apple-mail-mcp
cd apple-mail-mcp
uv sync
uv run ruff check src/
uv run pytest

License

GPL-3.0-or-later