Resend MCP Server: Setup, Tools and When You Need More Than an Email API

Short answer: yes, Resend has an official MCP server. It's open source, you can use the hosted version at mcp.resend.com/mcp with an OAuth sign-in or run it locally with an API key, and it covers nearly the whole Resend API: sending email, broadcasts, contacts, segments, templates, domains, automations and webhooks.

It's a very good tool for developers who live in Claude Code or Cursor. It's a less natural fit for the marketing side of email, where the people writing campaigns aren't the people writing code. This guide covers both, as of October 2026.

We run Audienceful, an email marketing platform with its own MCP server, so we have an obvious interest here. We've tried to keep the Resend sections factual and checked them against Resend's own docs and code. Tell us if anything changes.

What the Resend MCP server is

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is the open standard AI assistants use to work with outside tools. Resend's server exposes the Resend API as MCP tools, so an assistant can do in conversation what you'd otherwise do with the SDK or the dashboard.

Resend runs it two ways:

• Hosted: https://mcp.resend.com/mcp. Nothing to install. Your AI client opens a browser window, you sign in to Resend and approve access with OAuth. For headless or CI use you can pass an API key as a Bearer token instead.
• Local: the same open-source code is published on npm as resend-mcp. Run it with npx and a RESEND_API_KEY.

Resend is also listed in Claude's connector directory, and ships plugins for Claude Code, Codex and ChatGPT, and Cursor.

What it can do

The current package registers over 100 tools. Grouped roughly:

• Sending: send a single email now or on a schedule, send up to 100 in one batch call, update or cancel a scheduled email, and look up sent emails and their metrics.
• Broadcasts: create, update, duplicate, schedule, send and cancel broadcasts, and list recipients and clicked links.
• Contacts and segments: add, update and remove contacts, import a CSV, and manage segments (what Resend used to call audiences), topics and contact properties.
• Templates: create, edit, duplicate and publish templates.
• Automations and events: create and update automations, send events and read automation runs.
• Infrastructure: add and verify domains, manage suppressions, webhooks and API keys, and read logs and usage.

For a developer, the best uses are the jobs that used to mean a trip to the dashboard: "verify my new sending domain and tell me which DNS records are missing", "why did this password reset bounce?", or "send me a test of the welcome template with this data".

How to set it up

Claude Code (hosted):

claude mcp add --transport http resend https://mcp.resend.com/mcp

Then run /mcp, pick resend and sign in.

Claude on the web or desktop: add Resend from the connector directory, or open Settings → Connectors → Add custom connector and paste https://mcp.resend.com/mcp.

Local, with an API key:

claude mcp add resend -e RESEND_API_KEY=re_xxxxxxxxx -- npx -y resend-mcp

If you only want the assistant to send, create the key with Resend's Sending access permission. That key can't call the other endpoints, which makes it a simple way to limit a local server.

Where it stops

None of these are bugs. They follow from what Resend is: an email API for developers.

• It acts on the API directly. When the assistant calls a send tool, the email goes out. Some destructive tools tell the assistant to double-check with you first, but there's no server-side "preview, then approve" step for a send. The safety net is your AI client's tool-approval prompt, so keep it switched on.
• Content is code or HTML. Resend has a template editor, React Email and new editor tooling, but most teams still build emails as code. If your marketer wants to tweak a headline, someone has to do it in a template.
• Two plans, two price models. Transactional email is billed by volume: the free tier covers 3,000 emails a month (100 a day), and Pro starts at $20 a month for 50,000. Marketing broadcasts are billed separately by contacts: free up to 1,000, then from $40 a month for 5,000. Check Resend's pricing for the current numbers.
• Product data and marketing data live apart. That's fine if a developer owns both. It's harder when marketing wants to segment by what people did in your product.

Resend MCP vs Audienceful MCP

Switching from Resend?

• One plan, not two. Audienceful prices by contacts, and transactional email runs on the same plan. At 3,000 contacts it's $29/mo billed yearly ($37.50 monthly), against $40 for Resend's marketing plan alone. See the full Resend comparison.
• Approval enforced by the server. Every send needs a preview of recipients and timing and a single-use approval, so a stray prompt can't email your list.
• An editor your whole team can use. Drafts land in a collaborative block editor with reusable themes, so a marketer can polish what the assistant wrote without touching code.
• Revenue in every report. Native Shopify and Stripe integrations attribute orders to the emails that drove them, so "which campaign made the most money?" gets a real answer.

Start free: the free plan covers up to 1,000 contacts. Then bring your list over with our migration guide.

When to use which

Stick with Resend if a developer sends all your email from code, your marketing is the occasional product update, and you want the assistant in your editor to manage infrastructure. It does that very well.

Look at Audienceful if people who don't write code need to send email too. Your assistant writes the campaign in a real editor your team can review, builds the audience from a sentence, sets up the onboarding sequence (paused, so nothing goes out early) and only sends after you approve the exact recipients. For product email, transactional sends use the same emails, contacts and reporting, triggered by one API call from your app. Your assistant can send them from chat too, like "send the receipt email to jane@example.com for order 1234". And if you'd rather not use an outside assistant at all, the AI agent built into Audienceful does the same work in the app.

Plenty of teams run both: Resend for password resets, Audienceful for everything a marketer touches. If you'd rather have one tool, see our Resend comparison, or connect Claude or Claude Code and Cursor to Audienceful in a minute.

FAQs

Does Resend have an official MCP server?

Yes. It's open source on GitHub as resend/resend-mcp, published on npm as resend-mcp, and hosted at https://mcp.resend.com/mcp.

Do I need an API key for the Resend MCP server?

Not for the hosted server, which uses an OAuth sign-in. The local server and headless setups use a Resend API key.

Can the Resend MCP server send marketing emails?

Yes. It can create, schedule and send broadcasts to a segment. Broadcasts are billed on Resend's contact-based marketing plans, separately from transactional email.

What's a good alternative to the Resend MCP for email marketing?

If the people sending campaigns don't write code, use a marketing platform with its own MCP server. Audienceful's email marketing MCP server works with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Cursor and Claude Code, adds a required preview and approval before any send, and is included on every plan.