Gmail connector or forwarding: how should Claude Code read email?

Two kinds of tool can put an email in front of Claude Code. A connector gives the AI access to your mailbox, and it goes looking. Forwarding works the other way round: you pick an email and send it to the AI. Both are useful. They are not interchangeable, and choosing the wrong one gives the AI either too little or far too much.

This post compares Claude’s Gmail connector with dearkarl, a forwarding pipe we build: open source if you host it yourself, and a hosted version that is not open yet. The facts about the connector are from Anthropic’s own documentation, as of October 2026.

What is the difference, in one sentence?

A connector lets the AI into your mailbox; forwarding brings one email out of it. With a connector, the AI can search everything you have ever received. With forwarding, it sees only the messages you chose to send it.

How do they compare, side by side?

dearkarl comes in two versions: self-hosted, which runs on your own accounts and works today, and hosted, which we run for you and which is not open yet. Both are in the table.

Sources: the Gmail connector article, Claude Code’s MCP documentation, the dearkarl README and, for the hosted version, dearkarl.com.

When is a connector the better choice?

When you don’t know which email you need. A connector is a search tool, and search is what it does well:

• “Find the invoice from the hotel in March.”
• “Which emails from this client are still waiting for my reply?”
• “Draft a reply to the last message from the accountant.”

Forwarding cannot help with any of these, because you would first have to find the email yourself. If you want the AI to search, sort or answer your mail, use the connector. That is what it is for.

When is forwarding the better choice?

When you already know which email matters. Most everyday requests are about a single message: a booking confirmation, a brief from a client, an article you want to read later. For those, mailbox access gives the AI far more than the task needs. Forwarding is the better fit when:

1. You want the AI to see one message, not years of mail. An inbox also holds other people’s messages: clients, family, colleagues. None of them agreed to an AI reading them. We wrote about what one mailbox reveals in What can an AI learn about you from your email?
2. You don’t want the AI to be able to send. A connector with write access can act on your behalf. Every email in the mailbox is text the AI may read while searching, and some of it can be written to steer the AI. This is prompt injection.
3. The email arrives on your phone and the work happens on your laptop. Forwarding works from any mail app, and the message waits for your next Claude Code session.
4. Your account has no connector. The Microsoft 365 connector needs an admin to set it up and does not support personal Outlook.com, Hotmail or Live accounts. Any account that can forward an email works with dearkarl.

Can you use both?

Yes, and for many people that is the sensible setup. Keep the connector for the days you need to search, and forward single emails the rest of the time. Claude Code lets you turn a claude.ai connector off for one project with /mcp, so a repo where you work with client code does not need your mailbox connected at all.

How does dearkarl work?

You forward an email; your next session reads it as a file. dearkarl is an email-to-AI pipe: forward any email to your own secret address and it lands as a plain markdown file your next Claude Code session can read.

The self-hosted version runs entirely on your accounts:

1. Cloudflare Email Routing receives the mail at a secret address on your domain.
2. A small Worker checks the sender against your allowlist and turns the message into markdown, in memory.
3. The file is committed to a private GitHub repo you own.
4. Your next Claude Code session opens with a short note: “2 new things arrived.”

Mail is stored as untrusted data, never as instructions, and the code behind each of these claims is public. To install, paste the repo URL into Claude Code and say “install this”.

Is there a version without self-hosting?

Yes, but it is not open yet. The hosted version removes the domain, the GitHub repo and the deploy. As described on dearkarl.com, it will work like this:

1. Sign in with Google. dearkarl creates one folder in your Google Drive and can see that folder only, through Google’s drive.file permission. It never asks for your mailbox.
2. You get your own secret address, such as claude-x7k2m9@in.dearkarl.com. Only senders you have named get through.
3. Paste one line into Claude Code. It tells Claude Code where to find the folder.

Each forwarded email is written to that folder as a markdown file. Our server holds the message in memory for a few seconds on the way and never writes it to a disk of ours. The price is not announced yet. The waiting list is on dearkarl.com.