lifemail

Give any instance of Claude Code on a Mac the ability to search, read, and triage your email — including Outlook/Exchange mail — and cross-reference it with your Obsidian notes. It works by indexing Apple Mail's local store into a private on-device SQLite database and exposing it to Claude Code as MCP tools, plus two bundled skills. Nothing leaves your machine; nothing talks to Outlook/Exchange over the network.

How it reads "Outlook" mail: you add your Outlook/Exchange account to Apple Mail.app (macOS Mail) as usual. lifemail reads whatever Mail.app has already synced to disk. So any account Apple Mail supports — Outlook, Gmail, iCloud, IMAP — is fair game.

What you get

• Email tools (mcp__lifemail__*): full-text search, read a message, read a whole thread (de-duplicated), filter by category/mailbox/sender/date, and save an email into an Obsidian note.
• Two skills that load in every Claude Code session:
  • lifemail — how to drive the email tools well (triage rules, thread handling, cross-referencing notes).
  • obsidian — drive your Obsidian vault via Obsidian's official CLI (search/read/write/tags/links/tasks).

Requirements

Requirement	Needed for	Notes
macOS	everything	Reads Apple Mail's on-disk store; macOS-only.
Outlook account in Apple Mail.app	email	Add it in Mail → Settings → Accounts and let it sync.
Node.js 20+	building the server	brew install node@20 or nvm.
Claude Code	using it	The claude CLI installs and runs the server.
Full Disk Access	email	The one manual step — see Install. Without it the mail index is silently empty.
Obsidian 1.12.7+ w/ CLI	notes features	Optional. Settings → General → "Command line interface".

Install

The install is done by Claude Code. Open Claude Code on your Mac and tell it:

Clone https://github.com/Genomewide/lifemail and follow its docs/INSTALL.md.

Claude will clone the repo, run scripts/install.sh (stages the server to ~/.lifemail, builds it, registers the MCP server at user scope, and installs the two skills), then walk you through the one manual step. Or run it yourself:

git clone https://github.com/Genomewide/lifemail.git && cd lifemail
bash scripts/install.sh                                  # email only
bash scripts/install.sh "/Users/you/Obsidian/YourVault" # also point the obsidian-* tools at a vault

The one manual step: Full Disk Access

Reading ~/Library/Mail is protected by macOS. Without Full Disk Access, mail indexing silently returns zero emails — it looks like an empty inbox, not an error.

1. System Settings → Privacy & Security → Full Disk Access
2. Enable it for the app that runs Claude Code — your terminal app (Terminal/iTerm) for the CLI, or the Claude desktop app.
3. Quit and reopen that app.

After the restart, the server auto-indexes your last 30 days of mail ~5 seconds after it starts.

Verify

• claude mcp list → lifemail shows connected.
• Ask Claude to run sync-status → mail rows > 0 (0 rows means Full Disk Access is missing).
• Ask Claude to search your email for something you know is there.

Using it

Just talk to Claude Code — the lifemail skill teaches it the rules. Examples:

• "Summarize my email from the last two days." (defaults to your primary inbox, skips junk/drafts)
• "Find the thread with Dana about the budget and show me the whole conversation."
• "What did I get from anyone at example.com this week?"
• "Anything in my inbox that needs a reply or has a deadline?"
• "Log this week's project emails into my Obsidian project pages." (previews first, then writes on approval)
• "Search my notes and my email for 'Q3 launch' and pull it together."

Note operations (create/rename/move notes, tags, backlinks, tasks, daily notes) go through the obsidian skill, which drives Obsidian's official CLI.

How it's laid out

lifemail/
├── server/          # the MCP server (TypeScript; indexes Apple Mail → SQLite)
├── skills/          # lifemail + obsidian skills (copied to ~/.claude/skills/ on install)
├── scripts/install.sh
├── docs/INSTALL.md  # step-by-step runbook (what Claude Code follows)
└── README.md

The running server lives at ~/.lifemail; its database at ~/.personal-index/index.sqlite. Both stay on your machine.

Troubleshooting

• sync-status shows 0 mail rows / "empty inbox" → Full Disk Access isn't granted, or you didn't restart the host app after granting it.
• better_sqlite3.node ... NODE_MODULE_VERSION error → your Node version changed. Run cd ~/.lifemail && npm rebuild better-sqlite3.
• Notes tools error / "vault not found" → point them at your vault by re-running the installer with your vault path, or use the obsidian skill (official CLI) instead.

Privacy

Everything is local: Apple Mail is read from disk, indexed into a SQLite file under ~/.personal-index, and exposed only to your local Claude Code. No email content is sent anywhere.