by Glenn Fleishman
MailMaven adds POP, AppleScript, and AI interaction
Back in April of this year, I suggested that the MailMaven email app for macOS might become my new best friend. Months later, with continuous minor and major improvements, the friendship has only grown richer. MailMaven 1.1 in April added POP support for those people who rely on the ancient email mailbox protocol. But MailMaven 1.2, out last week, packed more punch: fully realized AppleScript support coupled with the open standard Model Context Protocol (MCP) to allow large language model AIs to engage with MailMaven. Michael Tsai evaluated the AppleScript support and wrote that it is “really impressive.”
Support for MCP via AppleScript means that you can have AI agents communicate directly with MailMaven to improve spam detection, recognize important messages, collect order or financial information, or perform an infinite number of other tasks in which your incoming or outgoing email acts as the hub of knowledge. SmallCubed, the app’s developer, has created a basic MCP server for Claude as a working example. You can write AppleScript from scratch using its terse, thorough guide, or point a code chatbot at the page to write AppleScript for you. I currently have a few nightly scripts that collate book sales and archive the day’s email by digging into MailMaven’s database; I need to rewrite those to use AppleScript instead!