Inbox Zero MCP Server

About

There are two parts to Inbox Zero:

1. An AI email assistant that helps you spend less time on email.
2. Open source AI email client.

If you're looking to contribue to the project, the email client is the best place to do this.

Thanks to Vercel for sponsoring Inbox Zero in support of open-source software.

Features

• AI Personal Assistant: Manages your email for you based on a plain text prompt file. It can take any action a human assistant can take on your behalf (Draft reply, Label, Archive, Reply, Forward, Mark Spam, and even call a webhook).
• Reply Zero: Track emails that need your reply and those awaiting responses.
• Smart Categories: Categorize everyone that's ever emailed you.
• Bulk Unsubscriber: Quickly unsubscribe from emails you never read in one-click.
• Cold Email Blocker: Automatically block cold emails.
• Email Analytics: Track your email activity with daily, weekly, and monthly stats.

Learn more in our docs.

Feature Screenshots

AI Assistant	Reply Zero
Gmail client	Bulk Unsubscriber

Demo Video

Built with

• Next.js
• Tailwind CSS
• shadcn/ui
• Prisma
• Upstash
• Turborepo

Feature Requests

To request a feature open a GitHub issue. If you don't have a GitHub account you can request features here. Or join our Discord.

Getting Started for Developers

We offer a hosted version of Inbox Zero at https://getinboxzero.com. To self-host follow the steps below.

Contributing to the project

You can view open tasks in our GitHub Issues. Join our Discord to discuss tasks and check what's being worked on.

ARCHITECTURE.md explains the architecture of the project (LLM generated).

Requirements

• Node.js >= 18.0.0
• pnpm >= 8.6.12
• Docker desktop (optional)

Setup

Here's a video on how to set up the project. It covers the same steps mentioned in this document. But goes into greater detail on setting up the external services.

The external services that are required are:

• Google OAuth
• Google PubSub - see set up instructions below

You also need to set an LLM, but you can use a local one too:

• Anthropic
• OpenAI
• AWS Bedrock Anthropic
• Google Gemini
• Groq Llama 3.3 70B
• Ollama (local)

We use Postgres for the database. For Redis, you can use Upstash Redis or set up your own Redis instance.

You can run Postgres & Redis locally using docker-compose

docker-compose up -d # -d will run the services in the background

Create your own .env file:

cp apps/web/.env.example apps/web/.env
cd apps/web
pnpm install

Set the environment variables in the newly created .env. You can see a list of required variables in: apps/web/env.ts.

The required environment variables:

• NEXTAUTH_SECRET -- can be any random string (try using openssl rand -hex 32 for a quick secure random string)
• GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID -- Google OAuth client ID. More info here
• GOOGLE_CLIENT_SECRET -- Google OAuth client secret. More info here
• GOOGLE_ENCRYPT_SECRET -- Secret key for encrypting OAuth tokens (try using openssl rand -hex 32 for a secure key)
• GOOGLE_ENCRYPT_SALT -- Salt for encrypting OAuth tokens (try using openssl rand -hex 16 for a secure salt)
• UPSTASH_REDIS_URL -- Redis URL from Upstash. (can be empty if you are using Docker Compose)
• UPSTASH_REDIS_TOKEN -- Redis token from Upstash. (or specify your own random string if you are using Docker Compose)

When using Vercel with Fluid Compute turned off, you should set MAX_DURATION=300 or lower. See Vercel limits for different plans here.

To run the migrations:

pnpm prisma migrate dev

To run the app locally for development (slower):

pnpm run dev

Or from the project root:

turbo dev

To build and run the app locally in production mode (faster):

pnpm run build
pnpm start

Open http://localhost:3000 to view the app in your browser.

To upgrade yourself, make yourself an admin in the .env: [email protected] Then upgrade yourself at: http://localhost:3000/admin.

Supported LLMs

For the LLM, you can use Anthropic, OpenAI, or Anthropic on AWS Bedrock. You can also use Ollama by setting the following enviroment variables:

OLLAMA_BASE_URL=http://localhost:11434/api
NEXT_PUBLIC_OLLAMA_MODEL=phi3

Note: If you need to access Ollama hosted locally and the application is running on Docker setup, you can use http://host.docker.internal:11434/api as the base URL. You might also need to set OLLAMA_HOST to 0.0.0.0 in the Ollama configuration file.

You can select the model you wish to use in the app on the /settings page of the app.

Setting up Google OAuth and Gmail API

You need to enable these scopes in the Google Cloud Console:

https://www.googleapis.com/auth/userinfo.profile
https://www.googleapis.com/auth/userinfo.email
https://www.googleapis.com/auth/gmail.modify
https://www.googleapis.com/auth/gmail.settings.basic
https://www.googleapis.com/auth/contacts

Set up push notifications via Google PubSub to handle emails in real time

Follow instructions here.

1. Create a topic
2. Create a subscription
3. Grant publish rights on your topic

Set env var GOOGLE_PUBSUB_TOPIC_NAME. When creating the subscription select Push and the url should look something like: https://www.getinboxzero.com/api/google/webhook?token=TOKEN or https://abc.ngrok-free.app/api/google/webhook?token=TOKEN where the domain is your domain. Set GOOGLE_PUBSUB_VERIFICATION_TOKEN in your .env file to be the value of TOKEN.

To run in development ngrok can be helpful:

ngrok http 3000
# or with an ngrok domain to keep your endpoint stable (set `XYZ`):
ngrok http --domain=XYZ.ngrok-free.app 3000

And then update the webhook endpoint in the Google PubSub subscriptions dashboard.

To start watching emails visit: /api/google/watch/all

Watching for email updates

Set a cron job to run these: The Google watch is necessary. The Resend one is optional.

  "crons": [
    {
      "path": "/api/google/watch/all",
      "schedule": "0 1 * * *"
    },
    {
      "path": "/api/resend/summary/all",
      "schedule": "0 16 * * 1"
    }
  ]

Here are some easy ways to run cron jobs. Upstash is a free, easy option. I could never get the Vercel vercel.json. Open to PRs if you find a fix for that.