Quoting Claude Opus 4.5, whom I had just asked to read my post about MCP design:
The philosophical shift: Design for the undertrained NOC kid at 2AM. I shouldn't need to understand JMAP's blob architecture to read an email. The MCP should do that work for me.
I'm in the process of getting Claude set up as a proper personal assistant. Using a slightly patched version of one of the existing JMAP MCP servers, it was able to go through my email and clean out messages that didn't need my attention.
That was pretty damn good. I got ambitious and asked it to read my 50 most recent substantial outgoing messages to learn how to mimic my style.
I'm honestly still pretty uncomfortable with the idea of Claude writing prose that I care about. I'm good with it writing a lot of developer documentation (with supervision). And I'm ok with it writing words for me to read. I'm not yet sure that I want it sending any kind of substantial email on my behalf, but I've decided that, with some training wheels and some guard rails, I'm ready to find out if it can help me handle email I've been procrastinating.
This morning, I got everything wired up enough to give that a try.
It did not go well.
It should go without saying that any end-user tool that requires the user to be familiar with the underlying protocol that the tool speaks could probably be better.
So, now I've got Claude building out a JMAP MCP. It's turtles all the way down.