Claude can't read your OVH email. Here's the 60-second fix

You added the Gmail connector to Claude and it just worked. Then you tried to point it at your real address, the contact@yourstudio.fr that lives at OVH, and there was nothing to click. No connector, no OAuth screen, no option. That is not a bug. It is structural, and once you see why, the fix is obvious.

Why hosting-provider mailboxes are locked out

AI assistants ship native email connectors for exactly two providers: Gmail and Microsoft 365. Both expose a self-serve OAuth flow, the "Sign in with Google" pop-up that hands an app a scoped token without ever sharing your password. That token is what a connector needs.

Now look at where most independents, agencies and EU businesses actually keep their mail: OVH, Gandi, Infomaniak, IONOS, one.com, Hostinger, Zoho, Fastmail, or a cPanel box at some web host. None of them offer self-serve OAuth for IMAP. We checked, provider by provider: there is no "Sign in with OVH" for a third-party app to consume. Fastmail's OAuth needs manual client registration; Proton requires its paid desktop Bridge. For the rest, the only key that exists is your mailbox password, the exact same one you already typed into Thunderbird, Apple Mail and your phone.

So the platforms will never ship native connectors for these providers. There is no token for them to request. The gap is permanent, not a roadmap item, which means a bridge that takes IMAP credentials once and speaks the assistant's protocol on the other side is the only shape that can ever work.

What a bridge actually does

That protocol is MCP, the Model Context Protocol, the open standard Claude, ChatGPT, Le Chat and others use to talk to external tools. anymailmcp.com is a hosted MCP server. You give it your mailbox once; it presents your email and calendar to any MCP-capable assistant as a clean set of tools: search your inbox, read a message, draft a reply, move or flag mail, list your folders, read and create calendar events.

Under the hood it is a live IMAP proxy. When your assistant searches your inbox, we open a connection to ssl0.ovh.net (or mail.gandi.net, or wherever your mail lives), run the query, and stream the result back. We do not copy your mailbox into a database. Email bodies are never stored on our side; the only thing we keep is the encrypted credential we need to log in, plus a usage counter.

The 60-second setup

There is no client ID to register, no API key to generate, no token to paste. It is three moves:

1. Add one URL. In Claude's connector settings (or ChatGPT, Le Chat, Cursor…), add a custom connector pointing at https://anymailmcp.com/mcp.
2. Type your email and password once. Your assistant opens our secure page. We auto-detect your IMAP and SMTP settings from your address, and for OVH that resolves to ssl0.ovh.net, then verify the login live against your own mail server. A successful login is also proof you own the mailbox, so there's no separate confirmation email.
3. Start asking. "Summarise the unread mail from this week." "Draft a reply to the invoice from Sofia." "What's on my calendar Thursday?" It works from the first message.

If your provider supports app passwords, like Infomaniak, Fastmail (mandatory there), Zoho, mailbox.org, or OVH's newer Zimbra platform with 2FA, the connect page steers you to generate one. That hands us a revocable, scoped credential instead of your real password.

Security, briefly

The whole product is a trust exercise, so the defaults are conservative. Your credentials are encrypted with AES-256-GCM, and the decryption key is held outside the database, so a database dump alone is useless ciphertext. Email content is never persisted; every read is a live proxy. You hold the off switch: disconnecting wipes your credentials instantly, and changing your mailbox password revokes us unilaterally, the same way it would log out any other mail client. Hosting is in the EU, and the only metadata we retain is which tool ran and when, for your quota counters.

What it costs

Nothing to start, and there is no trial clock. The free tier gives you one mailbox, every tool except sending, and 150 calls a month, enough to actually live in it, free forever until you outgrow it. No card required. When you hit the limit, your assistant is told exactly which quota you reached and hands you an upgrade link; Solo is 4.99 € a month, goes unlimited on calls, adds real sending, and covers up to five mailboxes, and you can cancel anytime.

Your OVH inbox was never the problem. The missing OAuth was. Get started, free and let Claude read it.