`gmail` and `google calendar` MCP servers ship with an empty `url` in 12 plugins, while CONNECTORS.md lists them as included

Summary

12 plugins declare gmail and google calendar MCP servers whose url is the empty string. Claude Code registers them as real HTTP servers, attempts a connection every session, and fails — permanently, since there is no endpoint to reach.

The docs and the manifest disagree. Several of these plugins list Gmail and Google Calendar in the CONNECTORS.md table as Included servers, with no qualifier. sales/CONNECTORS.md, for example:

| Calendar | `~~calendar` | Google Calendar, Microsoft 365 | — |
| Email    | `~~email`    | Gmail, Microsoft 365           | — |

The repo already has a convention for this case — data/CONNECTORS.md marks unfinished entries with * Placeholder — MCP URL not yet configured. None of the 12 plugins applies it to Gmail or Google Calendar, so there is no signal, in the docs or at runtime, that these were never meant to work.

Affected plugins

customer-support, design, engineering, enterprise-search, finance, human-resources, legal, marketing, operations, product-management, productivity, sales — 24 blank entries in total.

Enumerated at be9c0dae6d2004078973993a73fccc8e8f32cf83 with:

for f in */.mcp.json; do
  jq -r --arg p "${f%%/*}" '.mcpServers | to_entries[] | select(.value.url == "") | "\($p): \(.key)"' "$f"
done

The same sweep also reports blank snowflake / databricks / benchling entries in data, finance, and bio-research. Those are explicitly footnoted as placeholders in their CONNECTORS.md, so they are mentioned only for completeness — the undocumented Gmail and Calendar entries are what this issue is about.

Reproduction

1. Enable any affected plugin (e.g. sales@knowledge-work-plugins).
2. Run claude mcp list.

Observed:

plugin:sales:google calendar:  (HTTP) - ✗ Failed to connect
plugin:sales:gmail:  (HTTP) - ✗ Failed to connect

Note the empty URL between the server name and (HTTP).

Why this is worth fixing

The failure mode points the user in the wrong direction. "Failed to connect" reads as a network or auth problem, so the natural response is to hunt for a sign-in that does not exist. Gmail and Calendar make this especially confusing: a user with working Gmail and Google Calendar connectors sees duplicate entries for those same services failing, which suggests their real connectors are broken. That was the reading that prompted this report.

It is not user-recoverable. The plugins declare no userConfig, so there is no supported way to supply the missing URL. Neither disabledMcpjsonServers nor deniedMcpServers suppresses a plugin-provided server. The only workarounds are editing the plugin cache by hand — which a plugin update reverts — or disabling the entire plugin, which also discards its skills.

It obscures genuine failures. These entries sit alongside servers that are legitimately unauthenticated or unreachable, making the healthy-vs-broken distinction harder to read.

Suggested fix

Remove the gmail and google calendar entries from the 12 .mcp.json files. The CONNECTORS.md tables can keep listing the categories: a category documented but absent from the manifest costs the user nothing, since they connect their own MCP server for it — which is what the tool-agnostic ~~category design already anticipates.

Two smaller alternatives, if shipping the entries is preferred:

• Apply the existing * placeholder footnote to them, so the docs at least match the manifest.
• Have Claude Code skip registering an MCP server whose url is empty, rather than registering it and reporting a connection failure. That is a client-side fix and probably belongs in the Claude Code repo instead.

Environment

• Claude Code on macOS (Darwin 25.6.0)
• Marketplace anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins @ be9c0dae6d2004078973993a73fccc8e8f32cf83