Gmail MCP Server

Email is the original productivity sink, and Gmail's search operators — mastered by approximately nobody — are the gate to its contents. The Gmail MCP server (GongRzhe's auto-auth implementation being the community standard) puts an assistant in front of your inbox with the full verb set: search with proper Gmail query syntax, read threads, draft, send, label, archive, delete, and batch-process messages at scale.

Search-plus-synthesis is where it pays off first. "Find the thread where the vendor quoted pricing and summarise the final numbers" beats manually excavating a six-month-old conversation. The assistant writes fluent Gmail queries — from:x has:attachment after:2025/01/01 — that most humans never learn, and then actually reads the results for you.

The writing side is drafting-forward, which is the correct posture for email: the assistant composes, you review, it sends. Attachment support and HTML email are covered; batch operations (label these fifty newsletters, archive everything matching this pattern) handle the hygiene work that inboxes accumulate.

Setup is Google-flavoured: create OAuth credentials in a Google Cloud project, then run the package's one-time auth command — it opens a browser, you sign in, tokens save locally and refresh themselves. The "autoauth" in the name is earned; it's the least painful Google OAuth flow in the MCP ecosystem. As with any integration that can send email as you, keep client confirmations on for send tools, and start with a label-and-draft workflow before granting the assistant fuller autonomy over your correspondence.

Query syntax worth knowing

• Operators compose freely — newer_than:7d has:attachment larger:5M from:accounts@ is one query, and the assistant writes that reliably where a human would fall back to scrolling.
• in:anywhere is required to reach spam and trash. A search that "finds nothing" is very often searching only the inbox while the message sits one label away.
• Batch tools act on message IDs returned by a previous search, which means a sloppy query becomes a sloppy bulk archive. Have it list matches first, then modify.
• The Gmail API meters quota units per user per second, and reads are far more expensive than label changes — relabelling a thousand messages is fine, fetching a thousand full bodies will hit the ceiling and need backing off.

Recorded tools

• search_emails — Search with full Gmail query syntax
• read_email — Read a message or thread, including attachments metadata
• send_email / draft_email — Compose and send, or save as draft for review
• modify_email — Label, archive, mark read/unread
• batch_modify_emails / batch_delete_emails — Bulk label, archive or delete operations
• download_attachment — Save attachments locally

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