craig-email

name	craig-email
description	Access Craig's 3 email accounts — Gmail (personal), BoochTek (business), and SLUUG (old personal). Use this skill whenever the user asks to access emails, or when a task would benefit from email data (receipt hunting, conference confirmations, subscription audits, etc). Knows folder structures, MCP tool mappings, search syntax differences, and gotchas for each account.

Craig's Email Accounts

Craig has 3 email accounts connected via separate MCP servers. Each has different tools, folder structures, and quirks.

Account overview

Account	Address	MCP server	Transport	Primary use
Gmail	[e-mail]	claude.ai hosted Gmail MCP	HTTPS (OAuth)	Personal email, conference registrations, donation receipts, software subscriptions
BoochTek	[e-mail]	Fastmail's official MCP at https://api.fastmail.com/mcp	HTTPS (OAuth)	Business email, client work, business expense receipts
SLUUG	[e-mail], *@craigbuchek.com	@codefuturist/email-mcp via ~/bin/sluug-mail-mcp wrapper	stdio (IMAP)	Old personal email address with vanity domains

The local audit script at ~/Personal/Email/startup.sh verifies all three are healthy.

Identifying the right MCP tools

MCP tool names include server-specific prefixes that may change between sessions (especially Gmail, which has a UUID prefix). To find the right tools:

1. Check available tools for keywords: gmail, fastmail, sluug-mail
2. If tools are deferred, use ToolSearch to load them before calling
3. The tool naming patterns are stable within a session once loaded

Gmail (personal)

Key tools: search_threads (or search_messages), get_thread, create_draft, list_labels

Search syntax: Gmail uses its own query language, not IMAP. Examples:

• from:anthropic after:2025/1/1 before:2026/1/1
• "tax receipt" OR "tax-deductible" OR "501(c)(3)"
• subject:confirmation from:southwest
• label:important has:attachment filename:pdf

Gotchas:

• Gmail returns threads, not individual messages
• Results are reverse-chronological by default
• Gmail MCP has rate limits; batch searches by theme rather than doing hundreds of individual message reads

BoochTek / Fastmail (business)

Uses Fastmail's official remote MCP server announced 2026-04-23 at https://api.fastmail.com/mcp. OAuth-based with three scope tiers: read-only / write / send.

Key tools: Enumerate the first time you use the server in a session by listing tools whose names contain fastmail. Fastmail's blog post did not document the canonical tool names — they may evolve. Update this skill once you've verified the actual names.

Important folders:

• Business Expenses — receipts for software, services, domains, subscriptions, etc
• Travel — booking confirmations, itineraries
• Conferences — conference-related correspondence

Gotchas:

• When listing emails, specify the folder/mailbox explicitly — without it you typically get INBOX only.
• Attachments need a separate fetch call after the listing tool returns attachment IDs.
• If claude mcp list shows Needs authentication, run /mcp and complete the OAuth consent screen.

SLUUG mail (old personal)

Uses the NPM @codefuturist/email-mcp@0.2.1 package (installed globally; binary email-mcp) invoked through ~/bin/sluug-mail-mcp. The wrapper exports MCP_EMAIL_* env vars with the password pulled from macOS Keychain (service name sluug-mail-mcp).

Server config: mail.sluug.org:993 (IMAP SSL) and mail.sluug.org:465 (SMTP SSL).

Login identity: the From: address is [e-mail], but the IMAP/SMTP login username is [e-mail] (the SLUUG account, not the vanity address). Set via MCP_EMAIL_USERNAME in the wrapper. If that ever stops working, the fallback is the bare local part booch.

Key tools: list_emails, get_email, search_emails, list_mailboxes, find_email_folder (verify in-session).

Search syntax: IMAP-based search via the sluug-mail MCP.

Diagnostics: the wrapper passes args through to the underlying CLI, so ~/bin/sluug-mail-mcp test sluug runs the package's IMAP+SMTP login check directly. The startup.sh audit calls this so a stale password doesn't silently pass the MCP-level health check.

Gotchas:

• When fetching individual emails, the full body can be very large. Use maxLength parameters if available to avoid blowing up context.
• TLS chain quirk: SLUUG's mail server ships only the leaf cert without the Let's Encrypt R12 intermediate. The wrapper sets NODE_EXTRA_CA_CERTS=~/.config/email-mcp/lets-encrypt-r12.pem to compensate. When LE rotates intermediates, re-download from https://letsencrypt.org/certs/ and update the pem. Proper fix would be server-side (configure mail.sluug.org to serve the full chain).
• Auth lockout: SLUUG runs fail2ban-style IP blocking on the IMAP port. After 2–3 failed logins, the server starts refusing TCP entirely (ECONNREFUSED on 993). The ban typically lifts in 10 min to ~1 hour. So: never spray-test username/password variants — confirm the exact credentials before retrying. If you do get banned, switch to a phone hotspot or ask the SLUUG admin to lift it.
• MCP-handshake ≠ IMAP-login: claude mcp list reports SLUUG as "✓ Connected" the moment the stdio MCP server starts. That does NOT mean credentials are accepted — IMAP login is deferred until first tool call. Always confirm with ~/bin/sluug-mail-mcp test sluug (or just run startup.sh, which does this for you).
• "SLUUG" may be case-sensitive in some places.