Parseur can connect directly to Claude (Claude.ai, Claude Desktop, or Claude Code) through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Once connected, you can manage mailboxes, upload documents, check parsing results, and set up exports — all by chatting with Claude in plain English, without leaving your conversation to open the Parseur dashboard.
This article covers what the integration can do and walks through a few common use cases to get you started.
What is MCP?
MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open standard that lets AI assistants like Claude securely call external tools. When you connect the Parseur MCP server, Claude gains a set of "tools" it can use on your behalf — for example, listing your mailboxes, uploading a document for parsing, or generating an export link. Claude decides when to use these tools based on what you ask it to do, so there's no special syntax to learn.
Prerequisites
Before you start, make sure you have:
- An active Parseur account
- A Claude account with MCP/connector support (Claude.ai Pro/Team/Enterprise, Claude Desktop, or Claude Code)
- Permission to add connectors in your Claude workspace (organization admins may need to enable connectors first)
Connecting Parseur to Claude
1. In Claude, open Settings → Connectors (or + → Connectors in the chat box, depending on your client).
2. Search for Parseur and select it.
3. Authorize the connection — this uses your Parseur account credentials and scopes access to your own mailboxes and documents.
4. Once connected, you'll see Parseur's tools available in your chat. You can start asking Claude to work with your Parseur account right away.
Note: If you're building or running your own custom MCP server against the Parseur API (for example, using the `parseur-py` Python client with a framework like FastMCP), the setup is slightly different — you'll register the server manually in your `claude_desktop_config.json` rather than through the connector picker. Reach out to support if you'd like guidance on a custom integration.
What can you ask Claude to do?
Here are some common use cases to try once you're connected:
1. Check on your mailboxes
"List my Parseur mailboxes sorted by document count."
"How many documents did the Invoices mailbox process this week?"
2. Upload and parse a document
"Upload this receipt to my Receipts mailbox and tell me what data was extracted."
Claude will upload the file, wait for parsing to finish, and summarize the extracted fields.
3. Investigate a parsing issue
"Why did this document fail to parse? Show me the logs."
Claude can pull document-level processing logs to help you troubleshoot extraction errors.
4. Set up an export
"Create a CSV export for my Orders mailbox with the order number, date, and total fields."
5. Manage fields and templates
"Add a new field called 'PO Number' to my Purchase Orders mailbox."
"What fields does my Invoices mailbox currently extract?"
6. Automate with webhooks
"Set up a webhook so my Zapier flow gets notified whenever a document finishes processing in the Leads mailbox."
Tips
Be specific about which mailbox you mean - if you have several similarly named mailboxes, include the mailbox ID or exact name to avoid ambiguity.
For large mailboxes, ask Claude to filter (e.g., "documents received this month") rather than requesting the full history, since very large result sets can be slow to return.
Destructive actions (deleting a document, mailbox, or export config) will always be confirmed with you before Claude executes them.
Troubleshooting
Claude says it can't find any Parseur tools.
Check that the connector is still authorized under Settings → Connectors - OAuth tokens can expire and may need to be refreshed.
A mailbox list comes back empty even though you have mailboxes.
This can indicate a temporary connector-level issue rather than an account problem. Try asking Claude to fetch a specific mailbox by ID as a workaround, and contact support at [email protected] if the issue persists.
Claude's data looks out of date.
Ask Claude to re-fetch - MCP calls are made live against your account, but Claude won't automatically refresh information already in the conversation unless asked.
Have a use case that isn't covered here? Let us know at [help.parseur.com](https://help.parseur.com) so we can expand this article.