How to connect Claude to Notion, Gmail, and Google Drive

Claude out of the box knows text. Claude connected to your tools knows your business.

The bridge is MCP — Model Context Protocol. It's an open standard that lets Claude talk to external services through a local server. Once connected, Claude can read your Notion pages, search your emails, and list your Drive files as naturally as it reads your code.

Here's how to set it up for the three tools I use most.

What MCP actually is

An MCP server is a small process running locally that exposes tools Claude can call. When you ask Claude "what did I write in my Notion project notes?", Claude calls the Notion MCP tool, gets the content, and responds with it.

Everything goes through your machine. Your data doesn't leave to a third-party service — it goes from your tool's API to your local MCP server to Claude.

Configuration lives in ~/.claude/settings.json under mcpServers.

Notion

Install:

npx -y @notionhq/notion-mcp-server

Configure in ~/.claude/settings.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "notion": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@notionhq/notion-mcp-server"],
      "env": {
        "OPENAPI_MCP_HEADERS": "{\"Authorization\": \"Bearer YOUR_NOTION_TOKEN\", \"Notion-Version\": \"2022-06-28\"}"
      }
    }
  }
}

Get your token: Notion → Settings → Integrations → Create integration → copy the Internal Integration Token. Add the integration to the pages you want Claude to access.

What you can do now:

• "Search my Notion for notes on [topic]"
• "Create a new page in my Content database"
• "Update the status of [task] to Done"

Gmail

Install:

npx -y @gongrzhe/server-gmail-autoauth-mcp

This one handles OAuth automatically on first run — it'll open a browser window for Google auth.

Configure:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "gmail": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@gongrzhe/server-gmail-autoauth-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

What you can do now:

• "Search my emails for invoices from last month"
• "Draft a reply to [sender] saying [message]"
• "List unread emails with label [label]"

Note: drafts are created, not sent. Claude won't send emails without you reviewing them — the tool creates a draft you then send manually.

Google Drive

Install:

npx -y @isaacphi/mcp-gdrive

Requires a Google Cloud OAuth app (free). Follow the setup in the repo README to get your credentials file.

Configure:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "gdrive": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@isaacphi/mcp-gdrive"],
      "env": {
        "GDRIVE_CREDENTIALS_PATH": "/path/to/credentials.json"
      }
    }
  }
}

What you can do now:

• "Find the contract for [client] in my Drive"
• "List recent files in my Projects folder"
• "Read the content of [document name]"

Combining them

The power isn't in any single integration — it's in combining them.

Example prompt: "Search Gmail for the brief from Acme Corp, summarize the key requirements, and create a Notion page in my Client Projects database with those requirements."

Claude makes three tool calls (Gmail search → read email → Notion create), synthesizes the content, and creates the page. What used to take 10 minutes of copy-paste takes 30 seconds.

Connected tools are also the foundation for automation. Once Claude can read and write Notion, Gmail, and Drive, you can wire those same integrations into a standalone pipeline — exactly how my first n8n agent turns one LinkedIn post into a Twitter thread, a newsletter paragraph, and a blog draft saved straight to Notion. If you want to design something reliable rather than fragile, the patterns in building AI agents that actually work apply directly here: deterministic trigger, gather context through MCP, then a deterministic action.

Security notes

• MCP servers run locally. No third-party service gets your credentials.
• Notion: limit integration access to only the pages you need.
• Gmail: the OAuth scope defaults to full access. Review the scope and restrict if you care about least-privilege.
• Don't commit your token/credentials to git. Use ~/.claude/settings.json (global, not project-level) for anything sensitive.

Verify the setup

After editing settings.json, restart Claude Code. Run:

/mcp

This shows connected servers and their status. Green means the server is running and tools are available. If a server is red, check the error — it's usually a missing token or wrong path.

MCP is one half of making Claude useful on your projects. The other half is conventions: see CLAUDE.md, the file every developer should have for how to make Claude follow your rules once it has access to your tools.