Mail MCP Detailed Setup

Advanced configuration and detailed documentation for the Mail MCP server.

For basic setup, see MCP Setup - Mail MCP.

Retrieving Both Mailing Lists

The quick start only retrieves dev@maven.apache.org. To retrieve both lists (dev@ and users@):

# Retrieve dev@ archives (July 2002-present, ~750MB)
for year in $(seq 2002 $(date +%Y)); do
  for month in $(seq -w 1 12); do
    docker compose exec scheduler retrieve-mbox --date ${year}-${month} --output-dir /app/data/dev || true
  done
done

# Retrieve users@ archives (Nov 2002-present, ~800MB)
for year in $(seq 2002 $(date +%Y)); do
  for month in $(seq -w 1 12); do
    docker compose exec scheduler retrieve-mbox --date ${year}-${month} --list users@maven.apache.org --output-dir /app/data/users || true
  done
done

# Index all downloaded mbox files
docker compose exec scheduler index-mbox --directory /app/data/dev/ --list dev@maven.apache.org
docker compose exec scheduler index-mbox --directory /app/data/users/ --list users@maven.apache.org

Initial retrieval (~1.5GB total) takes time but only needs to be done once. The scheduler container automatically updates both lists' archives hourly.

MCP Configuration Scopes

The quick start uses user-level configuration (-s user). For project-level configuration:

claude mcp add maven-mail -s project --transport http http://localhost:58080/mcp

See Claude Code Advanced Setup for details on configuration scopes.

Available Tools

Once configured, the following MCP tools are available:

search_emails

Full-text search across email archives with date and metadata filters. Supports filtering by JIRA references and votes.

search_by_contributor

Find all emails from a specific contributor by email address or name.

get_message

Retrieve a specific email by Message-ID. Includes automatic archive URL resolution.

get_thread

Retrieve an entire email thread for context.

find_references

Find emails mentioning specific JIRA issues (MNG-1234) or GitHub PRs.

Detailed Documentation

For complete documentation including:

  • Data management and indexing

  • Development setup

  • Architecture details

See Mail MCP Documentation.

Key Pages

Related