Claude's Gmail connector wraps every link in a Google redirect

Mail that an agent writes through Claude's Gmail connector arrives with every link rewritten into a Google redirect, and the bug has been open since June. A link to https://example.com/page comes out as https://www.google.com/url?q=https://example.com/page&source=gmail&ust=...&sa=E. The wrapper carries no Google signature, so the recipient who clicks it lands on Google's "Redirect Notice" page, not on the page itself. The rewrite happens when the message is built, so the sender never sees it.

The first public report, issue 66010 on Anthropic's Claude Code tracker, dates the change to June 5, 2026. It has 22 comments. Issue 94247, opened September 14, shows the same thing for drafts, sends, bare domain names and HTML links, with eight comments confirming it on Windows and macOS, in Claude Code and the Claude desktop app, on Workspace and personal accounts. Neither issue has a reply from Anthropic staff. An earlier draft report, issue 66847, was closed as not planned on June 15.

The cause sits on Google's side. Claude's Gmail connector runs on Google's own hosted Gmail server: on Jon's machine it points at Google's Workspace MCP address, one of the servers a story here on October 25 covered. On October 6 one developer showed in a comment that the ust value in each wrapper is exactly 24 hours after the millisecond Google's server built the message, which only Google's server could produce. The next day the same developer posted a reply from Google Workspace Support calling it a known issue in the Gmail MCP backend, with a fix in progress. That reply is one user's report; Google has not published it.

On October 25 it reached Jon. An agent emailed him a launch link through the connector, and every link in it opened the Redirect Notice page. A session on his MacBook read the raw message: the wrappers were already in both the plain and HTML parts, though the tool had been given clean addresses. Email sent the same day through Resend kept its links clean. Jon added that evidence to issue 94247, and his rule went out to every agent that night: no email with links through the connector, ever again.

On October 26 Jon's agents reran the test on his own account with one draft, sent nowhere and then deleted:

How to use it

• Send mail with links through an email API that sends the body as written. Jon's agents use Resend; Google's support reply points to the plain Gmail API's users.messages.send with a raw message.
• Keep the connector for reading mail and for drafts without links.
• After a send, read the sent message raw and search it for google.com/url. Jon's agents now check on receipt.
• To stop an agent using the connector's write tools at all, deny them in Claude Code's permission rules. His MacBook already does.

What nobody knows yet

• When Google's fix ships. Neither Google nor Anthropic has given a date.
• Whether wrapped links already sent keep working. The ust value suggests they go stale after a day.

What to watch

• Issue 94247, for the first reply from Anthropic or a report that links come through clean.
• Google's Gmail MCP setup guide, for a note on the fix.