Outlook Assistant

Outlook Assistant

MCP server for Outlook email, calendar, and contacts — let your AI assistant manage your inbox directly from the conversation.

Outlook Assistant connects AI assistants to your Microsoft Outlook account through the Model Context Protocol. Ask your AI assistant to search your inbox, send emails, schedule meetings, manage contacts, and configure mailbox settings — without leaving the conversation. Works with Claude, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Windsurf, and any MCP-compatible client.

Works with personal Outlook.com and work/school Microsoft 365 accounts.

Search inbox → read & summarise → draft a reply — all from the conversation

What you can do

• 📨 Search and read emails — find messages by sender, subject, date, or keywords; read full threads with conversation grouping; batch flag, move, export, or categorise multiple emails at once
• 🛡️ Send emails with safety controls — dry-run preview, pre-send mail tips (out-of-office, mailbox full, delivery restrictions), session rate limiting, and recipient allowlist to prevent mistakes
• ✏️ Draft emails for review — create, update, and send drafts; reply and forward as drafts; preview before saving with dry-run mode
• 📅 Manage your calendar — view upcoming events, look back at past ones or find them by date range and subject, schedule meetings with attendees, update, decline or cancel events
• 📦 Export emails — save individual messages to Markdown, EML, JSON, or CSV; export full conversation threads to MBOX or HTML; bulk-export search results in one call
• 🔍 Investigate email headers — full raw header access (DKIM, SPF, DMARC, delivery chain, X-Mailer, X-Originating-IP) for phishing investigation and compliance review
• 🗂️ Organise your inbox — create nested folders (addressable by path), set up inbox rules, colour-code with categories, manage Focused Inbox — all work together for complete inbox automation
• 🔄 Track inbox changes — delta sync detects new, modified, and deleted emails since your last check, with tokens for incremental polling
• 👥 Manage contacts — search your contact book and organisational directory, create and update contact records
• ⚙️ Configure settings — set out-of-office auto-replies, working hours, and time zone
• 📬 Access shared mailboxes — read and organise team inboxes and service accounts, including custom subfolders and nested folder paths; enumerate, read, and search the folder tree (best-effort — listings flag any branches skipped due to depth limits or per-folder errors), move/flag/categorise messages, and manage folders (work/school Microsoft 365 accounts; opt-in via OUTLOOK_SHARED_MAILBOX). Sending, drafts, replies, and forwards from a shared mailbox are not supported — those operations always act on the signed-in user's own mailbox
• 🏢 Find meeting rooms — search by building, floor, capacity, AV equipment, and wheelchair accessibility (Microsoft 365)

Why Outlook Assistant?

Features

22 tools total — consolidated from 55 for optimal AI performance. See the Tools Reference for complete parameter details.

Export Formats

Format support varies by target:

Export individual emails, search results, or entire conversation threads — use target=messages with a search query (or the query shortcut) to batch-export without manually collecting IDs.

Account Compatibility

Outlook Assistant works with both personal and work/school Microsoft accounts, but some features behave differently:

Note: On personal accounts, Microsoft's $search API has limited support for free-text queries. Outlook Assistant handles this automatically with progressive search — if your query returns no results, it falls back through OData filters, boolean filters, and recent message listing to find your emails. For the most direct results on personal accounts, use the structured filter parameters (from, subject, to, receivedAfter).

What Makes This Different

• Progressive search — on accounts where Microsoft's $search API is limited, Outlook Assistant automatically falls back through up to 4 search strategies to find your emails, and reports which one answered in _meta.searchMetadata along with any filter it could not honour (droppedFilters). Most Graph API wrappers fail silently; this one adapts and tells you.
• Email forensics — raw header access for DKIM, SPF, DMARC, delivery chain, X-Mailer, X-Originating-IP, and spam scores. Returns the full data so you can investigate phishing, audit compliance, or trace delivery issues. (Auto-verdict is on the roadmap; today the data is surfaced and analysed in-conversation.)
• Delta sync — incremental inbox monitoring returns only what changed since your last check, with tokens for continuous polling. Designed for agent workflows that need to watch a mailbox.
• Batch operations — flag, move, export, or categorise multiple emails in a single call. Search-driven export lets you batch-export results without collecting IDs manually.
• Pre-send intelligence — check recipients for out-of-office, full mailbox, delivery restrictions, and moderation status before sending — no other Outlook MCP server offers this.
• Compound automation — rules, categories, folders, and Focused Inbox work together. Set up complete inbox management through your AI assistant in one conversation.

Safety & Token Efficiency

Outlook Assistant is designed with safety-first principles for AI-driven email access:

Destructive action safeguards — Every tool carries MCP annotations (readOnlyHint, destructiveHint, idempotentHint, openWorldHint), all four set explicitly on every tool, so AI clients can auto-approve safe reads and prompt for confirmation on destructive operations like sending email, inviting attendees or deleting events. send-email and create-event also carry Claude's anthropic/requiresUserInteraction flag, so Claude Code asks before every call to them, dry runs included, even in auto-accept or bypass modes.

Read-only mode — Set OUTLOOK_READ_ONLY=true and the server refuses every tool call or action that isn't a read before it runs: no sends, drafts, moves, flags, deletes, rules, settings changes, exports or attachment downloads, and no dry runs either. Searching and reading still work, and so does signing in. auth action=about shows whether it's on.

Server instructions — When a client connects, the server sends it instructions for th