gws-gmail-read

A command-line skill for reading a Gmail message by its message ID. It can return the body or selected headers, such as the sender, recipient, subject, and date, as text or JSON.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to extract message text, inspect email headers, retrieve HTML, or pass structured email data to another command.
Why use it?
It avoids manually opening Gmail and makes email contents easier for scripts and coding agents to inspect.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/googleworkspace/cli/gws-gmail-read
Any agent
npx skills add googleworkspace/cli --skill gws-gmail-read
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/googleworkspace/cli

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 19 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 425 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00019 $0.00425
Opus 5 $0.00010 $0.00212
Sonnet 5 $0.00004 $0.00085
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00042

Measured 2d ago against content hash 11707bc21b93, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

gws-gmail-read scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

Copies of this mod

3 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

skills/gws-gmail-read/SKILL.md · 53 lines

What it actually says

gmail +read

PREREQUISITE: Read ../gws-shared/SKILL.md for auth, global flags, and security rules. If missing, run gws generate-skills to create it.

Read a message and extract its body or headers

Usage

gws gmail +read --id <ID>

Flags

Flag Required Default Description
--id The Gmail message ID to read
--headers Include headers (From, To, Subject, Date) in the output
--format text Output format (text, json)
--html Return HTML body instead of plain text
--dry-run Show the request that would be sent without executing it

Examples

gws gmail +read --id 18f1a2b3c4d
gws gmail +read --id 18f1a2b3c4d --headers
gws gmail +read --id 18f1a2b3c4d --format json | jq '.body'

Tips

  • Converts HTML-only messages to plain text automatically.
  • Handles multipart/alternative and base64 decoding.

See Also

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 53 lines · 19 tokens per session scan A 11707bc21b93

Subscribe to this mod's changes

gws-gmail-read is a skill published in the GitHub repository googleworkspace/cli (30,691 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 19 tokens to every session and 425 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.