Gmail

What Claude can do

• Search messages
• Read a message (coded)
• List labels
• Prepare a draft

No sending, no deletion, no filters: you review and send from Gmail.

Everything the service returns is coded before it reaches Claude.

Before you start

• A Google account.
• The Google access file, with these APIs enabled: Gmail API. The same file serves Gmail, Calendar and Drive.

Set up

1. Hidden Tokens dashboard → Connectors.
2. On the Gmail row, click Enable.
3. If the access file is not in place yet: Choose the Google access file… and pick it. It stays on this computer.
4. Click Sign in: your browser opens the Google page. Choose your account and accept.
5. Click Test. The status turns to “Ready”.

Try it in Claude

Find this week’s messages about an invoice and summarise them.

Claude should use a gmail__… tool and answer with codes. To get the real values back in a text, ask Hidden Tokens to decode it: they come back on your computer, not in the chat.

Switch off the original connector

In Claude, Settings → Connectors and Extensions: switch off Gmail. Otherwise the AI can go through it, in clear.

Limits

• No sending, no deletion, no filters: you review and send from Gmail.
• If your Google Cloud project is in “testing” mode, Google expires the sign-in after 7 days: click Sign in again.
• Images and binary attachments are not passed to Claude: a pixel cannot be coded.
• Tried with a real Gmail account in Claude Desktop on a Mac (10 November 2026, app 0.44.1); not yet on Windows.

A problem? See Troubleshooting.