What is Inbox Zero MCP Server

Inbox Zero is an open-source AI-powered email assistant designed to help users achieve inbox zero efficiently by managing their email tasks and automating several actions through an intuitive interface.

Use cases

It is useful for busy professionals looking to streamline their email management, automate responses, track replies, categorize emails, unsubscribe from unwanted communications, and analyze email activity through various features.

How to use

Users can self-host the application by following the setup instructions provided in the documentation, which includes configuring environment variables, setting up Google OAuth, and defining Redis and Postgres settings. Once set up, users can run the application, manage their email, and customize settings to fit their needs.

Key features

Key features include an AI personal assistant for email management, a reply tracking system, smart email categorization, a bulk unsubscriber, a cold email blocker, and email analytics to track user activity over time.

Where to use

Inbox Zero can be used on a personal computer or server as a web application accessible via a browser, making it versatile for both self-hosted environments or through the provided hosted version.

Inbox Zero - Your AI Email Assistant

Open source email app to reach inbox zero fast.
Website · Discord · Issues

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 contribute 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

Star History

Feature Requests

To request a feature open a GitHub issue, 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.

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.

Requirements

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

Make sure you have the above installed before starting.

The external services that are required are (detailed setup instructions below):

• Google OAuth
• Google PubSub

Updating .env file: secrets

Create your own .env file from the example supplied:

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:

Secrets:

• NEXTAUTH_SECRET – can be any random string (try using openssl rand -hex 32 for a quick secure random string)
• 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)

Redis:

• 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.

Updating .env file with Google OAuth credentials:

• GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID – Google OAuth client ID. More info here
• GOOGLE_CLIENT_SECRET – Google OAuth client secret. More info here

Go to Google Cloud. Create a new project if necessary.

Create new credentials:

1. If the banner shows up, configure consent screen (if not, you can do this later)

   1. Click the banner, then Click Get Started.
   2. Choose a name for your app, and enter your email.
   3. In Audience, choose External
   4. Enter your contact information
   5. Agree to the User Data policy and then click Create.
   6. Return to APIs and Services using the left sidebar.

2. Create new credentials:

   1. Click the +Create Credentials button. Choose OAuth Client ID.
   2. In Application Type, Choose Web application
   3. Choose a name for your web client
   4. In Authorized JavaScript origins, add a URI and enter http://localhost:3000
   5. In Authorized redirect URIs enter http://localhost:3000/api/auth/callback/google
   6. Click Create.
   7. A popup will show up with the new credentials, including the Client ID and secret.

3. Update .env file:

   1. Copy the Client ID to GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID
   2. Copy the Client secret to GOOGLE_CLIENT_SECRET

4. Update scopes

   1. Go to Data Access in the left sidebar (or click link above)
   2. Click Add or remove scopes
   3. Copy paste the below into the Manually add scopes box:

   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
   

   4. Click Update
   5. Click Save in the Data Access page.

5. Add yourself as a test user

   1. Go to Audience
   2. In the Test users section, click +Add users
   3. Enter your email and press Save

Updating .env file with LLM parameters

You 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)

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.

If you are using local ollama, you can set it to be default:

DEFAULT_LLM_PROVIDER=ollama

If this is the case you must also set the ECONOMY_LLM_PROVIDER environment variable.

Redis and Postgres

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

Running the app

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.

Premium

Many features are available only to premium users. To upgrade yourself, make yourself an admin in the .env: [email protected]
Then upgrade yourself at: http://localhost:3000/admin.

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. Others are optional.

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.

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).