How Gmail API's Quota Units Work?

Question

According to gmail's API docs, the limits are as follows:

API Limit Type  Limit
Daily Usage 1,000,000,000 quota units per day
Per User Rate Limit 250 quota units per user per second, moving average (allows short bursts)

In the table further below, the docs say that a messages.get costs 5 quota units.

In my case, I am interesting in polling my inbox every second to check for new messages, and get the contents of those messages if there any.

Question 1: Does this mean that I'd be spending 5 quota units each second, and that I'd be well under my quota?

Question 2: How should check for only "new" messages? That is, messages that have arrived since the last time I made the API call? Would I need to add "read" labels to the messages after each API call (spending extra quota units on the "modify" API call), or is there an easier way?

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 10:30

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Question 1:

That's right. You would spend (5 * 60 * 60 * 24 =) 432000 quota points on the polling, which is nowhere near the limit. You could also implement push notifications if you want Google to notify you of new messages rather than polling yourself.

Question 2:

Listing messages has an undocumented feature of querying for messages after a certain timestamp, given in seconds since the epoch.

If you would like to get messages after Sun, 29 May 2016 07:00:00 GMT, you would just give the the value after:1464505200 in the q query parameter.

edited May 23 '17 at 10:30

Community

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answered May 29 '16 at 08:01

Tholle

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A little late, but if you want to "poll" you can use the push notification like Tholle menthoed, but you should also look into [using Gmail History](https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/v1/reference/users/history) it's actually much better and more reliable since you won't need to "label" anything after – shalomabitan Apr 06 '17 at 21:32

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:02

Question 1:

You're right about that and as also detailed in your given documentation.

Question 2:

For an easier way, as you've asked, and also encouraged is with the use of Batching Requests. As discussed in the documentation, Gmail API supports batching to allow your client to put several API calls into a single HTTP request.

This related SO post - Gmail API limitations for getting mails can further provide helpful ideas on the usage of batching.

How Gmail API's Quota Units Work?

2 Answers2