We use Help Scout to support our customers. It's simple, well-designed, and gets out of the way. Over the past year, we've been integrating AI agents into more of our internal workflows — using tools like Claude and Cursor to automate research, draft responses, and triage incoming requests.
The problem: our AI tools had no way to talk to Help Scout.
There's no official CLI. There's no Model Context Protocol server. So we built one.
What helpscout-cli Does
helpscout-cli is two things in one package:
1. A command-line interface for Help Scout
Manage conversations, customers, mailboxes, and tags directly from your terminal. Useful for scripting, automation, and anyone who prefers the command line over a browser.
helpscout conversations list
helpscout conversations get <id>
helpscout conversations reply <id> --message "Thanks for reaching out..."
helpscout customers list --mailbox <mailbox-id>
2. An MCP server for AI agent integration
The Model Context Protocol is an open standard that lets AI tools like Claude, Cursor, and others connect to external data sources and take actions on your behalf. With helpscout-cli running as an MCP server, your AI agent can:
- Read and search conversations
- Reply to customers
- Look up customer history
- Triage and tag conversations
No custom code required — just configure the server and your AI tool picks it up automatically.
Why We Open-Sourced It
We built this for ourselves. Once it was working, the decision to open-source it was straightforward: anyone running Help Scout alongside AI tooling will hit the same wall we did. Publishing our solution costs us nothing and saves someone else the work.
Mobile Locker is primarily a Laravel and PHP shop, but we're not dogmatic about our stack. We use what works. This tool is built on Node.js because it fit the job well. The MIT license means you can use it, fork it, and adapt it however you need.
Getting Started
The repo is at github.com/mobilelocker/helpscout-cli. Installation and configuration instructions are in the README.
You'll need a Help Scout API key, which you can generate from your Help Scout account settings.
What's Next
This is our first public open source release. We'll continue publishing tools when we build something worth sharing. If you run into issues or have ideas for the CLI, open an issue on GitHub — we're actively maintaining it.
If you're curious about our broader approach to open source, see our Open Source page.