Use Apple Mail in Claude

Claude cannot open Apple Mail, and pasting emails in one by one does not scale past a few. Exporter writes every email Mail keeps on your Mac as a Markdown file and serves those files to Claude over a local MCP server, so Claude can search a year of receipts or a long thread and answer from them. The server runs on your Mac; your mailbox is never uploaded to it.

Steps

1. Connect Mail: press “Connect” beside Mail (under “More Apps”), then “Open Mail Folder”, and select ~/Library/Mail in the panel. Choose where the files go and press “Use This Folder”.
2. On “Choose Emails”, keep the kinds you want Claude to read. Transactions holds receipts and orders; Updates and Promotions start unticked. Press “Sync”.
3. On the MCP Server card, press “Start”. The card shows localhost:8744.
4. Connect Claude Code (add --scope user to have it in every project):

claude mcp add --transport http exporter http://localhost:8744/mcp

5. Ask: “Which subscriptions did I pay for this year, and what did each cost?”, or “Summarize what the contractor and I agreed by email in September.”

Claude Desktop, Cursor and VS Code connect from the buttons on the same card.

What you get

• search finds emails by their words across every export, and read returns an email’s Markdown with its sender, recipients, account and kind in the front matter
• new mail becomes a file on its own while Exporter runs, so Claude reads today’s email too
• the server listens on 127.0.0.1 only: nothing outside your Mac can reach it

Pitfalls

• Claude sees what you exported: on the free allowance, your newest 1,000 emails. “Unlock Mail” adds the rest.
• Attachments stay in Mail; Claude reads the email’s text and links. What a tool returns goes to the model, like anything you paste.

The tools and every client are in the MCP server docs, the files in the Mail docs.