How to connect any IMAP mailbox to ChatGPT and Claude (2026 guide)

Claude and ChatGPT can read your email, but only if it lives at Gmail or Microsoft 365. Every other mailbox gets no connector, no sign-in button, no way in. The reason is boring, and the fix takes about a minute.

Why SMTP/IMAP is not supported by most AI providers' built-in connectors

Email hosting is close to a duopoly. While building our own prospect list we ran MX lookups on more than 400,000 company domains: two out of three of the live ones run their mail on Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. If you were choosing which two connectors to build, you would stop there too.

The other reason is OAuth. Google and Microsoft let an app open a sign-in popup and walk away with a scoped token, so a connector never touches your password. Almost no IMAP provider offers that, and without OAuth there is no connector to ship. So the built-ins stop at two, and OVH, Gandi, IONOS, Zoho, iCloud and the cPanel box at your web host stay locked out.

Anymail solves this

anymailmcp.com lets you wrap your email provider, or a custom IMAP/SMTP server, into an MCP, the open protocol assistants use to talk to outside tools. You connect your mailbox once, with the same address and password you would type into Thunderbird or Apple Mail, and it becomes a set of mail and calendar tools: search, read, draft, send, check your week, book meetings.

That MCP plugs into any assistant that speaks the protocol. Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, Vibe and Cursor all take the same URL: https://anymailmcp.com/mcp.

Supported providers

We support 31 providers today and keep adding more: OVH, Gandi, Infomaniak, IONOS, one.com, Zoho, Fastmail, iCloud and the rest are on the providers page, each with its own walkthrough. Not listed? It almost certainly still works: enter your IMAP and SMTP settings under advanced configuration on the connect form and we verify them live against your server. Tell us at contact@anymailmcp.com and we will add yours too. The one mailbox we cannot reach is Proton Mail, which offers no hosted IMAP.

Try it now

Pick where your email is hosted and which assistant you use. Setup takes about a minute.

Is it safe?

Your credentials are encrypted with AES-256-GCM, and we never store your email: every read is a live call to your provider, nothing from your mailbox lands in a database. Disconnecting wipes your credentials on the spot. And where your provider supports app passwords (Fastmail, Zoho and iCloud do), the connect page steers you to one, so you hand over a revocable credential instead of the real thing. The full picture is in how we keep it safe.