Connect an AI assistant

Allodia Mail & Calendar can hand your mail to an AI assistant running on your own computer: Claude Desktop, Claude Code, or anything else that speaks the Model Context Protocol (MCP). The assistant reaches the app through a private channel on your machine that only your own login can open. No server of ours is in that path, and we are not told that you switched it on.

The feature is on macOS and Windows. The screenshots below are macOS.

Three separate decisions

Switching this on grants nothing by itself. Access is three controls, in this order, and each is its own decision:

1. On or off, off to begin with.
2. Which accounts it may use, none to begin with.
3. Whether it may send mail, off to begin with.

1. Switch it on

Open Settings → Advanced; the panel is at the top.

Tick Allow assistants to use my mail. The line underneath reports whether the app is really listening, rather than only repeating what the switch says.

An assistant that connects at this moment sees nothing whatsoever. The account list below is empty, and the app says so out loud, because otherwise an assistant reporting "your inbox is empty" would be indistinguishable from one that was given nothing to look at.

2. Choose which accounts it reaches

Tick only the mailboxes you want it in. An account you leave unticked is not exposed, and is not even named to the assistant, because which accounts you have is itself something you did not agree to share.

Unticking one takes effect immediately, including on an assistant that is already connected. There is nothing to restart.

3. Decide about sending

With Let assistants send mail directly off, which is the default, an assistant that wants to send something opens a prefilled draft in the app instead, for you to read and send yourself.

If you do switch it on, leave Only send to people you already email ticked. It refuses any recipient who is neither at one of your own accounts' domains nor already in your Sent mail. This is the control that actually stops a message in your inbox talking an assistant into mailing your mail somewhere else: a message can say anything it likes, but it cannot put its own address into your Sent history.

Point your assistant at the app

Below those switches is a configuration snippet with a Copy configuration button. It looks like this:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "allodia-mail-and-calendar": {
      "args": [
        "--endpoint",
        "/Users/you/.local/share/mailcal/mcp.sock"
      ],
      "command": "/Applications/Allodia Mail.app/Contents/Library/Helpers/allodia-mcp.app/Contents/MacOS/allodia-mcp"
    }
  }
}

Copy it from the app rather than from this page, because it carries the paths on your machine, and paste it into your assistant's MCP configuration. For Claude Desktop on macOS that file is ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json. If it already has an mcpServers block, add the allodia-mail-and-calendar entry inside it rather than replacing the block. Then restart the assistant.

The app has to be running. Quit it and your assistant reports the connection as unavailable.

What an assistant can do

For the accounts you ticked: list your folders and messages, search them, read one message at a time, mark messages read or unread, flag them, archive them, move them to Trash, mark them as spam, and open a draft reply. With sending switched on, it can also send.

Four things it deliberately cannot do:

• Delete anything permanently. There is no such command; Trash is as far as it goes.
• Add, change or remove an account.
• Pull message text in bulk. A search or a listing gives it subjects, senders and dates. The text of a message comes only from asking for that one message, one at a time.
• Change your mail invisibly. Anything it does happens in the app in front of you: an archived message leaves your list exactly as it would if you had swiped it away yourself.

Having an assistant read a message does not mark it read on your mail server. That is deliberate: asking "what's in my inbox" should not quietly clear your unread badges.

Switching it off again

Untick Allow assistants to use my mail. The channel closes and the assistant's next request fails. To keep the feature but cut one mailbox off, untick that account instead, which also takes effect at once.

If the status line ever reads On, but not listening, something stopped the app opening the channel. Settings → Diagnostics holds the log, and that is the thing to send us.