Last month I wired Claude up to my email infrastructure. Not "Claude writes an email draft and I paste it somewhere" but the agent checks my domain status, sends the email, and reads back the delivery events, all from the chat. The glue that makes this possible is MCP (Model Context Protocol), and the whole setup takes about five minutes. Here is exactly how to do it, plus what surprised me once agents could actually touch production infrastructure. What MCP actually is MCP is...