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Connect Gmail to Claude Cowork

Give Claude Cowork governed access to Gmail’s 16 tools through Runlayer, with identity, policy, scanning, and audit on every call.

Book a demo Claude Cowork setup guide

Set up

Add Gmail to Claude Cowork in four steps

Admins approve the server once. Everyone in Claude Cowork then gets it through the same governed connection.

  1. 1

    Approve Gmail in Runlayer

    Add Gmail from the catalog and choose who can use it and which of its tools are allowed.

  2. 2

    Connect Claude Cowork to Runlayer

    Claude Cowork gets connector tools through the Runlayer Plugin. With direct tool listing turned on for your deployment, Gmail’s 16 tools show up in Claude Cowork’s own tool list.

    Claude Cowork setup guide
  3. 3

    Sign in to Gmail

    Sign in the way Gmail requires. Runlayer holds the credentials so they stay out of the client’s configuration.

  4. 4

    Use Gmail from Claude Cowork

    Gmail’s approved tools appear in Claude Cowork. Every call is checked against policy and recorded.

Tools

16 Gmail tools in Claude Cowork

Runlayer policy decides which of these Claude Cowork users can call. 6 read data only.

  • Add labels

    Add one or more labels to a message or multiple messages

  • Archive messages

    Archive one or more messages (remove from inbox)

  • Create draft

    Create a draft email that can be edited later or sent

  • Create label

    Create a new label in the user's Gmail account

  • Fetch attachment

    Fetch a Gmail message attachment.

  • Fetch message

    Fetch the full content of a Gmail message using its message ID (don't use external tools to read messages)

  • List drafts

    List all draft messages with pagination support

  • List labels

    List all available labels in the Gmail account

See all 16 Gmail tools

Control

What Runlayer can see and stop in Claude Cowork

Some controls apply to every client at the gateway. Others depend on what Claude Cowork exposes to Runlayer.

  • Gateway policy (available)

    Every Gmail call from Claude Cowork passes through Runlayer, where your policies can allow, alert, mask, or block it.

  • Audit trail (available)

    Each call is recorded with the user, Claude Cowork as the client, the tool, and the policy and scanner decisions.

  • Anthropic inference hooks (available)

    Anthropic Inference hooks let Runlayer check Claude Cowork prompts before inference.

  • OTLP telemetry (available)

    Claude Cowork can send supported OpenTelemetry events to Runlayer for observe-only session visibility.

  • Stop a call before it runs (available)

    Runlayer can reject a Claude Cowork prompt before Anthropic runs it, which stops the whole request rather than one tool call.

  • Block output after it runs (available)

    Because Runlayer checks the full prompt, tool results in it can be blocked before the model sees them.

  • Redact output in place (not available)

    Runlayer cannot mask content in Claude Cowork. The gateway still applies policy to the call.

In Claude Cowork

  • Cowork session data sent over OpenTelemetry is for monitoring only and cannot stop anything.

Frequently asked questions

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