A read-only tool for searching Gmail and reading messages as plain text. It can return message details such as the subject, sender, date, preview, and full body.

Use it to search an inbox with Gmail queries or retrieve one message by its ID.

It lets you find and inspect email without opening Gmail manually, while avoiding accidental sending, label changes, read-status changes, or deletion.

gmail-read — Skill for Claude Code and Codex by jtsternberg: A read-only tool for searching Gmail and reading messages…

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/jtsternberg/claude-plugins/gmail-read

Any agent

npx skills add jtsternberg/claude-plugins --skill gmail-read

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jtsternberg/claude-plugins

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install gws, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 7 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jtsternberg/claude-plugins/gmail-read.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/jtsternberg/claude-plugins/gmail-read)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jtsternberg/claude-plugins/gmail-read"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jtsternberg/claude-plugins/gmail-read.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Per session 34 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 1,285 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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5	$0.00034	$0.01285
Opus 5	$0.00017	$0.00642
Sonnet 5	$0.00007	$0.00257
Haiku 4.5	$0.00003	$0.00128

Measured 4d ago against content hash e8b3490805da, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

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 4d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/read.sh), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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.

plugins/gws/skills/gmail-read/SKILL.md · 133 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 133 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Gmail Read

Search Gmail with a query, or fetch a single message by id, and get structured results back — subject, from, date, snippet, and optionally the full plain-text body (HTML stripped).

This skill only reads. It never sends, modifies labels, marks as read, or deletes. For composing, see the sibling gmail-draft-from-markdown skill.

Prerequisites

# Codex: this path resolves under Claude Code; substitute the directory containing this plugin.
PLUGIN_ROOT="${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}"
bash "$PLUGIN_ROOT/scripts/auth-preflight.sh"

Task

Run the entrypoint script, passing all arguments through:

# Codex: this path resolves under Claude Code; substitute the directory containing this SKILL.md.
SKILL_DIR="${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}"
bash "$SKILL_DIR/scripts/read.sh" $ARGUMENTS

If no arguments were provided, ask the user what to search for (subject keywords, sender, date range, etc.). Gmail search operators are supported verbatim (e.g. from:[email protected] newer_than:7d).

Arguments

Arg	Required	Notes
`"<query>"`	one of query or `--id`	Any Gmail search string. Use quotes.
`--id <messageId>`	one of query or `--id`	Fetch a single message directly.
`--limit N`	no	Max results in search mode (default 10).
`--body`	no	In search mode, also fetch each message's body. Slower — one extra API call per hit.
`--account LABEL\|EMAIL`	no	Override active gws account (accepts an account label or its email). Errors if no account matches.
`--pretty`	no	Human-readable output instead of JSON.

Behavior

Search mode

gws gmail users messages list with the query and maxResults=limit.
For each message id, fetch headers + snippet (and body if --body).
Emit one JSON object per line (NDJSON) so downstream tools can stream.

Each JSON object has:

{
  "id": "...",
  "threadId": "...",
  "subject": "...",
  "from": "...",
  "to": "...",
  "date": "...",
  "snippet": "...",
  "body": "..."          // only present with --body
}

Read the full file on GitHub · 133 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

scripts/read.sh 5.4 KB runs code

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.

4d ago First seen · 133 lines · 34 tokens per session scan A e8b3490805da

Subscribe to this mod's changes

gmail-read is a skill published in the GitHub repository jtsternberg/claude-plugins (5 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 34 tokens to every session and 1,285 once invoked, about $0.0002 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 2026-08-31.

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