A Gmail MCP for Claude: your whole email history, read-only
Ask Claude about an invoice from 2019, a contract you signed years ago, or what your builder said about the roof. Stow lets your assistant search every email you have ever kept, across your accounts. It can read. It cannot send, delete or change a thing.
In development. Stow and its connector are not released yet. This page describes how they are designed to work.
What it is
Stow is a private email archive for Mac. It brings years of old email down from the cloud into an encrypted, searchable archive on your computer. It includes an optional MCP server: a local connector that AI assistants such as Claude can use to search that archive when you ask them to.
Why use Stow rather than a direct Gmail connection
Claude already offers a Gmail connector that searches your mailbox online. It is free and quick to set up, and for recent mail it may be all you need. Stow is built for a different job: your whole history.
- Mail you have deleted from Gmail. A direct connection only sees what is still in your mailbox. Stow keeps everything it has archived, including years you cleared out to free up space.
- Every account at once. Gmail, Microsoft 365 and Outlook.com in one archive. You choose which accounts the assistant may search.
- What is inside attachments. The assistant can read the text of PDFs and Word documents, not just their names.
- Read-only by design. Stow's connector has no way to send, delete, move or label mail. Its tools can only search and read.
- A record of what was asked. Stow keeps a local log of each request: the search and how many results it returned, never the content.
About Claude's Gmail connector, from Anthropic's help centre, checked on 28 October 2026: it works with the one Google account you connect, sees attachment details but not their contents, notes that performance may vary for large mailboxes, and can draft and send email, asking for your approval by default.
What leaves your Mac
The connector is off until you turn it on, account by account. When it is on and you ask your assistant a question, Stow passes the matching emails to the assistant. Those results then go wherever your assistant sends your request, usually its provider's servers. If your assistant uses a model running entirely on your Mac, the results stay on your Mac.
Email is written by other people, so Stow marks it as content to read, not instructions to follow. That lowers the risk of a hidden instruction in an email misleading your assistant, and it is one more reason the connector can only read.
Which assistants work
Any assistant that can start a local MCP server on your Mac: the Claude desktop app, Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code and LM Studio, for example. Assistants that only support remote connectors cannot use it. Setup takes one copied command; see Using Stow with an AI assistant.
Questions
How is this different from an Apple Mail MCP server?
Those read the mail Apple Mail has downloaded. Apple Mail follows the server, so mail you delete from Gmail disappears from them too, and some can also move or delete mail. Stow keeps its own encrypted archive that stays when Gmail forgets, and its connector only reads.
Does it work with Outlook?
Yes. Stow archives Microsoft 365 and Outlook.com accounts as well as Gmail, and the assistant can search them together or one at a time.
Does the assistant see all my email?
Only the accounts you turn on, and only the emails that match what it searches for. Replies are capped in size, and you can turn the connector off at any time.
What does it cost?
The connector is part of Stow, with no extra charge: €30 once, with a 14-day free trial, for Macs with Apple silicon.
Stow is coming soon. Join the waitlist and we will email you once, the day it launches.