OneNote MCP: Most Servers Are Dead, One Works

Search for a OneNote MCP server and GitHub hands back a ranked list that looks healthy. The top result has 119 stars. The second has 49. Both stopped shipping code in 2025, and the open issues underneath the first one are people telling the author that sign-in no longer works.

Microsoft OneNote is the notebook app inside Microsoft 365. MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is the open standard that lets an assistant like Claude call out to a small local program and read something it otherwise cannot see. Put the two together and you get an assistant that can search every notebook you own instead of clicking through section tabs looking for a meeting you half remember.

That is the promise. The reality is that almost every server built for it has rotted, and they have all rotted in the same place. Here is which ones are alive as of September 2, 2026, why the dead ones died, and the one setup that works today.

The graveyard, with dates

Every repository below was checked against the GitHub API on September 2, 2026. The star counts are real and so are the dates, which is the whole point of putting them side by side.

Read the first row again. danosb/onenote-mcp is the most-starred OneNote server in existence and it has not had a commit in almost 17 months. It carries 5 open issues and 8 open pull requests. Three of those issues are sign-in failures, with titles like “Not providing a valid authentication token” and “cannot use trae to authenticate”. Three of the open pull requests are volunteers offering to fix authentication, and the oldest of them has been sitting unmerged since October 6, 2025.

That is not a project with a backlog. That is a project where the community showed up with patches and nobody was home.

The star trap

Stars measure how many people once thought a repository looked promising. They do not decay. A server that broke a year ago keeps every star it earned in the month it launched, and it keeps ranking above a working alternative because ranking follows stars. On this topic, sorting by stars gets you the wrong answer three times before it gets you a right one. Check the push date first. It takes five seconds and it would have saved everyone in those issue threads an afternoon.

Microsoft did not skip MCP, it skipped OneNote

This is the part most write-ups get wrong, because they were written before Microsoft moved.

Microsoft now runs a public catalog of first-party MCP servers at github.com/microsoft/mcp. It lists roughly 30 servers. Among them are Microsoft 365 Mail, Microsoft 365 Calendar, Microsoft 365 User, Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Word, OneDrive and SharePoint, and SharePoint Lists. Several are hosted remote servers you point a client at rather than code you run.

Search that catalog for the word OneNote and you get nothing. Not a preview, not a placeholder, not a link to a community project. Microsoft built an official MCP server for Word and did not build one for OneNote.

Anthropic drew the same line. The Microsoft 365 connector for Claude reads mail, calendar, Teams messages, meeting transcripts, and files from OneDrive and SharePoint. Its documentation is blunt about the exception, saying other formats, including OneNote, cannot be read. Notebooks still turn up in search results, because they are ordinary files sitting in a library, and then reading one fails on the file type. That gap between “it found my notebook” and “it cannot open my notebook” is why people go looking for a OneNote MCP server in the first place.

Why they rot, and it is authentication

Every server in that table talks to OneNote through the same door, the Microsoft Graph API. Graph is the single HTTP interface Microsoft puts in front of mail, files, calendars and notebooks.

The OneNote part of Graph has one property that shapes everything downstream. Microsoft’s own OneNote REST API overview states it in a single line. The Microsoft Graph OneNote API does not support app-only authentication.

Two words there do the damage. App-only authentication is where a program holds its own credential and calls the API as itself, the way an API key works. Delegated authentication is where the program acts as a signed-in human, using a token it got when you logged in. Mail and files let you pick. OneNote only allows the second one.

So no OneNote MCP server can ever be an API key you paste into a config file. Every single one has to run an interactive Microsoft sign-in, store the token, refresh it before it expires, and cope with your account being personal, work, or school, each of which consents differently. The delegated scopes involved are Notes.Read, Notes.ReadWrite, Notes.Create and their tenant-wide .All variants, and the .All ones need an administrator to approve them.

That is a login system, and a login system is not a weekend project. It is a thing that breaks whenever Microsoft changes a consent screen, and it needs an owner. This is exactly why a one-person OneNote server has a half-life of about six months while the same author’s Slack or filesystem server keeps working. It is also why the failing thing in those GitHub issues is always sign-in and never note parsing. The same pattern shows up in other note apps for different reasons, and it is worth reading the Logseq MCP servers next to this one, where the breakage is file formats rather than tokens.

The server that actually works

Softeria/ms-365-mcp-server is the answer, and it is not a OneNote server. It is a Microsoft 365 server that includes OneNote as one preset among many, alongside Mail, Calendar, OneDrive, Excel, To Do, Planner, Contacts and Search.

That framing is the reason it survives. The sign-in code is shared by every surface the project supports, so it gets exercised, reported on and fixed by people who came for their calendar. A OneNote-only server has one feature, and when its one feature is a Microsoft OAuth flow, it has no help.

The numbers back it. 948 stars against 119 for the most popular dedicated server, and a push on September 1, 2026, the day before this was written. Authentication runs through the Microsoft Authentication Library, Microsoft’s own sign-in library, rather than a hand-rolled token dance.

The OneNote tools it exposes cover the shape of the app rather than a slice of it. You get list-onenote-notebooks, list-onenote-notebook-sections, list-all-onenote-sections, list-onenote-section-pages, list-onenote-pages and get-onenote-page-content for reading, plus create-onenote-notebook, create-onenote-section, create-onenote-page and delete-onenote-page for writing. There is a parallel set for notebooks that live on a SharePoint site, which is where most work notebooks actually are.

Setting it up

Personal accounts work out of the box. Work and school accounts need the --org-mode flag, and your administrator may need to approve the scopes before your first sign-in completes.

Add this to claude_desktop_config.json for Claude Desktop, or run the equivalent claude mcp add for Claude Code. The --preset onenote argument keeps the tool list to notebook operations instead of loading all of Microsoft 365 into the context window.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ms-365": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@softeria/ms-365-mcp-server", "--preset", "onenote"]
    }
  }
}

Restart the client fully. The first tool call opens a Microsoft sign-in in your browser. Approve it, and the token is stored locally from then on.

Then confirm it before you trust it. Ask for a list of notebooks. If the list comes back, the token is live.

Copy this prompt

List my OneNote notebooks and their sections. Then open the three
pages that were changed most recently and tell me what each one is
about in a sentence.

If that returns an authentication error rather than a list, sign in again. Do not reinstall the package. Reinstalling is the reflex and it fixes nothing, because the failure is a stale token and not a broken build.

What to actually ask

The useful queries are the ones OneNote search cannot answer, because OneNote search matches words that are literally on the page.

• “Find the notebook page where we decided the pricing, whatever I called it.”
• “Read my Meetings section from the last month and list every action item with my name on it.”
• “Summarize the three pages in Project Atlas and tell me what is unresolved.”
• “Create a page in my Inbox section with these notes, formatted as a checklist.”

The write tools are the half people forget. Being able to say “put that in OneNote” at the end of a conversation, without switching apps, changes what the notebook is for. It stops being an archive you visit and starts being somewhere the assistant files things.

What it still cannot do

Be honest about the ceiling before you rearrange your week around this.

Handwriting and ink are not text. OneNote stores ink strokes as their own object. The Graph API returns page content as HTML, so an ink-heavy page reads as an almost empty page. If your notebooks are stylus notes on a Surface, this whole route does very little for you.

Embedded files come back as links, not content. A PDF pasted into a page is an attachment. The assistant sees a reference and can fetch the bytes, but it is not reading it as page text.

Search is not semantic. The tools list, read and filter. There is no embedding of your notebook, so “find the thing about the vendor negotiation” works only because the model reads the pages you hand it. On a large notebook that is slow and it costs context.

Personal and work notebooks are separate worlds. A consumer Microsoft account and a work tenant sign in differently and are reached through different paths. Running both at once means running the server twice with different flags.

Where ContextBolt fits

ContextBolt does not read OneNote and this post is not going to pretend otherwise.

What it does is the same job for a different pile. ContextBolt Bookmarks is a Chrome extension that captures your X, Reddit and LinkedIn saves automatically, plus any web page with one click. It tags each one, groups them by topic, and on Pro it exposes the whole collection to Claude over its own MCP endpoint with semantic search behind it, so you can ask for the article about a thing rather than the article whose title you remember. Basic is free with no account, and the endpoint comes with Pro at $6 a month, month to month.

That is the other half of most people’s reading. Notes are what you wrote. Saves are what you found. OneNote holds the first and has no good MCP story, which is what this post has been about. The second pile is usually bigger, and it is the one nobody has organized at all.

The relevant difference is maintenance, which is the theme of everything above. A community server for somebody else’s app is one person’s spare time standing between you and a broken OAuth flow. An endpoint run by the people who built the product is not. That is not a claim about clever code. It is a claim about who picks up the phone when Microsoft changes a consent screen. The same reasoning runs through the Apple Notes servers, where the maintained option beats the more interesting one, and through the four Obsidian servers, where the plugin that ships MCP itself quietly made the bridge optional.

Worth doing?

If your notebooks are typed and you already live in Claude, yes. The setup is one config block and a sign-in, and being able to ask a question across every section is a real improvement over clicking tabs.

If your notebooks are handwritten, no. You will spend twenty minutes to discover that ink is not text.

And whatever you do, do not install the first result. The most-starred OneNote MCP server on GitHub has three open reports saying sign-in is broken, three unmerged fixes for it, and no commits since April 2025. The one that works has been maintained continuously and is not a OneNote server at all. The other half of your reading, the pages and posts you saved rather than wrote, is what ContextBolt holds, and it is free to start.