When something is broken, build around it.

The Gmail MCP server wraps every URL in a Google redirect address before the email goes out. If you have ever had Claude manage any kind of mailing list, you have probably hit this. Your clean links land as https://www.google.com/url?q=... chains, which look suspicious, break formatting, and defeat the purpose of sending the email in the first place.

There is an open issue for this, so I am not the only one who found it. My personal read is that this is not a bug, it is a feature, specifically Google's link-wrapping and click-tracking layer built into Gmail itself, surfacing through the MCP server. I could be wrong, but I would be surprised.

Sidestepping the send function

Either way, I was not going to wait around. My workaround was to skip the Gmail MCP send function entirely. Instead, Claude calls a webhook, a URL that listens for an HTTP request and triggers an action when it receives one. That webhook points to a small n8n workflow I built, and n8n handles the actual send. The URLs inside the message body never touch the Gmail MCP server's wrapping logic, so they arrive exactly as written.

In the words of Dr. Frankenstein: it's alive.

MCP does not have to be the only path

The broader lesson is one I keep coming back to. MCP gives Claude a set of tools, but those tools do not have to be the only path. If one connection is broken, a webhook to something else is a genuinely useful escape hatch to have in your back pocket. You need to know a bit about how webhooks and n8n workflows hang together to pull this off, but if you are already building with Claude and MCP, you are probably closer to that than you think.

This is a small example of a pattern that shows up constantly in automation work: the off-the-shelf integration gets you most of the way, and the last five percent is where a bit of custom plumbing pays for itself. If you are stuck on a broken or limited tool connection in your own stack, I would rather talk it through than have you wait on someone else to fix it. You can find the details on the contact section of this site.