Guides · 12 articles
Email and AI agents
How AI assistants and coding agents get access to your mail, and what is safe to share with them.
Claude's Gmail Connector: How to Connect Claude to Gmail
Claude’s Gmail connector lets you ask questions about email in a Google account and use any Gmail actions the connection permits.
Is It Safe to Connect Claude or ChatGPT to Your Gmail?
Connecting an AI assistant to Gmail lets it read your messages to answer questions or take actions. The connection also sends email content to the assistant…
How to Let Claude Code Read Your Email
To let Claude Code analyze your email, first copy your messages into files it can read. mailmd is the recommended option: it copies messages from your…
Connecting ChatGPT to Gmail: How the Connector Works
With a Gmail connection, ChatGPT can use authorized email information to answer requests. Examples include summarizing a conversation, finding a message, or…
How to Give OpenAI Codex Access to Your Email
To let Codex work with your email, give it a readable copy of your messages. For a local archive you can reuse, use mailmd.
How to Get Your Email into Obsidian
To read email in Obsidian, save messages as Markdown files, plain-text files with simple formatting, inside an Obsidian vault, the folder Obsidian uses for…
How to Search Your Email with grep and ripgrep
Email services such as Gmail, Outlook, and iCloud keep messages on their servers. To search those messages with grep or ripgrep (rg), you first need email…
How to Search Years of Email with an AI Agent
Finding an old quote, promise, or decision in years of email takes more than asking an AI to “remember” your inbox.
How to Get an AI Summary of Your Email with a Coding Agent
A coding agent is an AI assistant that can run computer commands and read files to do a task. To summarize email, it needs to read the messages and get a…
How to Use a Local LLM with Your Email
A local large language model (LLM) is an AI model that runs on your computer and generates answers there.
How to Turn Your Email into a Personal Knowledge Base
Email holds instructions, decisions, and explanations you may need again. A personal knowledge base is a collection of useful information you can find,…
How to Read Gmail Messages with the Gmail API
get. The second request returns the message’s headers and body in a structured format. Gmail’s API is useful when code needs precise control over which…
Free and open source
Try mailmd
mailmd is a free command-line tool that copies your email into Markdown files on your computer, one file per message. It works with any IMAP mailbox, and with Gmail and Outlook through their own APIs.
Install
$ curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vincentsch/mailmd/main/install.sh | sh
Set it up with your coding agent
Set up mailmd so you can read my email. Use https://github.com/vincentsch/mailmd: read its AGENTS.md and follow the steps. Connect my mailbox and run the first sync. Then show me where the files are.