MCP Email Server: Real-Time Mirroring & Zero Downtime Reliability

What is MCP Email Server: Real-Time Mirroring & Zero Downtime Reliability?

MCP Email Server is a high-availability email service solution designed to deliver seamless IMAP and SMTP capabilities through real-time data mirroring and zero-downtime architecture. Built for critical production environments, it ensures continuous service availability even during maintenance or failures by maintaining synchronized server instances and enabling instant failover mechanisms.

How to Use MCP Email Server: Real-Time Mirroring & Zero Downtime Reliability?

Implementation follows these core steps:

1. UV Environment Setup: Use uv to manage deployments via uvx mcp-email-server@latest ui for configuration
2. Client Integration: Configure MCP clients with specific JSON schemas pointing to server entrypoints, supporting both local and Docker-based deployments
3. Automation via Smithery: Deploy pre-configured setups for platforms like Claude Desktop using Smithery CLI tools

Key Features of MCP Email Server: Real-Time Mirroring & Zero Downtime Reliability?

• Automatic data replication across multiple server instances
• Seamless failover mechanisms without service interruption
• Protocol support for IMAP4rev1 and SMTP with STARTTLS
• Modular configuration via JSON/YAML schemas
• Production-ready logging and health monitoring
• Scalable Docker compatibility for infrastructure flexibility

Use Cases of MCP Email Server: Real-Time Mirroring & Zero Downtime Reliability?

Primary applications include:

• Enterprise email systems requiring 99.99% uptime guarantees
• Continuous deployment pipelines needing fail-safe email testing
• Microservices architectures requiring decoupled messaging layers
• Disaster recovery setups with real-time data synchronization

FAQ from MCP Email Server: Real-Time Mirroring & Zero Downtime Reliability?

How is real-time mirroring achieved?

Through bidirectional sync protocols maintaining transactional consistency between nodes

What happens during server maintenance?

Active traffic automatically routes to standby instances without client disruption

Can this be integrated with Kubernetes?

Yes, through Docker deployments and healthcheck endpoints compatible with orchestration platforms

What authentication methods are supported?

PLAIN, LOGIN, and CRAM-MD5 for IMAP/SMTP, with optional OAuth2 extensions

How are configuration changes applied?

Hot-reloading mechanism applies updates without terminating active sessions

mcp-email-server

IMAP and SMTP via MCP Server

• Github repository : https://github.com/ai-zerolab/mcp-email-server/
• Documentation https://ai-zerolab.github.io/mcp-email-server/

Installation

Manual Installation

We recommend using uv to manage your environment.

Try uvx mcp-email-server@latest ui to config, and use following configuration for mcp client:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "zerolib-email": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["mcp-email-server@latest", "stdio"]
    }
  }
}

This package is available on PyPI, so you can install it using pip install mcp-email-server

After that, configure your email server using the ui: mcp-email-server ui

Then you can try it in Claude Desktop. If you want to intergrate it with other mcp client, run $which mcp-email-server for the path and configure it in your client like:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "zerolib-email": {
      "command": "{{ ENTRYPOINT }}",
      "args": ["stdio"]
    }
  }
}

If docker is avaliable, you can try use docker image, but you may need to config it in your client using tools via MCP. The default config path is ~/.config/zerolib/mcp_email_server/config.toml

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "zerolib-email": {
      "command": "docker",
      "args": ["run", "-it", "ghcr.io/ai-zerolab/mcp-email-server:latest"]
    }
  }
}

Installing via Smithery

To install Email Server for Claude Desktop automatically via Smithery:

npx -y @smithery/cli install @ai-zerolab/mcp-email-server --client claude

Development

This project is managed using uv.

Try make install to install the virtual environment and install the pre-commit hooks.

Use uv run mcp-email-server for local development.

Releasing a new version

• Create an API Token on PyPI.
• Add the API Token to your projects secrets with the name PYPI_TOKEN by visiting this page.
• Create a new release on Github.
• Create a new tag in the form *.*.*.

For more details, see here.