Give Claude Your Notes, Meetings and Email: the Day 1 Setup
Part 1 of 2: building the brain. Your notes, your meetings, your email, and the step that makes it answer like you.
Today you are building the brain.
By the end of this guide, Claude will be able to search your Obsidian vault, pull up what was actually said in your meetings, read the emails you have sent, and (this is the part almost everyone skips) write back in your voice instead of in generic assistant voice.
Part 2 is the hands: making it do things instead of just knowing things. That is a separate build. Get the brain right first, because a JARVIS with hands and no memory of you is just a chatbot with extra permissions.
Where a source is vague, wrong, or contradicts itself, this guide says so out loud rather than inventing something that looks plausible. There are four honest corrections to the video in the notes at the end. Read them. They will save you an hour.
StepBEFORE YOU START: the real prerequisites
Five things nobody tells you, and each one causes a silent failure that looks like "the guide is broken."
- You need Claude Desktop, not claude.ai in a browser. The Obsidian step runs a small server on your own machine at an address like 127.0.0.1. Anthropic's servers cannot reach your machine, so a browser tab can never connect to your vault. Download the desktop app first.
- The Obsidian step cannot be done through the Connectors screen. Anthropic states plainly that a custom connector "must be reachable over the public internet from Anthropic's IP ranges" and that servers behind a firewall "won't connect, even if you can reach them from your own machine." If you paste a 127.0.0.1 address into Add custom connector, it will fail, and it is not your fault. Obsidian is installed as a Desktop extension or via the config file instead.
- Three of the four steps are pure clicking. The Obsidian step is the one that asks more of you. This guide gives you the three-click version first and the fallback second. Naming the hard step is more useful than pretending it is not there.
- This guide is Mac first. Windows works, but the bridge component used by the Obsidian step has an open defect on Windows (60 second hang, then "Could not attach to MCP server"), tracked publicly as geelen/mcp-remote issue 296. The workaround is documented in Step 1.
- Plans, checked 18 July 2026. Claude Free is $0. Pro is $17 per month with the annual discount ($200 billed up front), or $20 billed monthly. Max starts at $100 per month. Connectors work on Free, with Free limited to one custom connector. The voice step in Step 4 uses Skills, which Anthropic describes as available to paid plans, so budget for Pro if you want the voice profile to persist.
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