Gmail API retrieves different number of emails than it is displayed in my account

Question

I need to retrieve the number of all and unread emails per label. To my surprise the numbers retrieved by the API are different from the ones I see in my account.

var request = gapi.client.gmail.users.labels.get({
    'userId': 'me',
    'id': 'CATEGORY_UPDATES'
});


In Gmail:
10,789
7,408
From the API:
threadsTotal: 11,251
threadsUnread: 7,408
messagesTotal: 12,416
messagesUnread: 7,714

var request = gapi.client.gmail.users.labels.get({
    'userId': 'me',
    'id': 'CATEGORY_SOCIAL'
});


In Gmail:
10,468
10,114
From the API:
threadsTotal: 10,468
threadsUnread: 10,114
messagesTotal: 10,873
messagesUnread: 10,457


var request = gapi.client.gmail.users.labels.get({
    'userId': 'me',
    'id': 'CATEGORY_PERSONAL'
});

In Gmail:
8,270
2,374
From the API:
threadsTotal: 3,251
threadsUnread: 1,066
messagesTotal: 8,896
messagesUnread: 5,135

var request = gapi.client.gmail.users.labels.get({
    'userId': 'me',
    'id': 'CATEGORY_PROMOTIONS'
});


In Gmail:
22,079
21,251
From the API:
threadsTotal: 22,091
threadsUnread: 21,251
messagesTotal: 22,215
messagesUnread: 21,330

Why the difference?

score 0 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:15

As far as I know, one possible cause for the difference as discussed in Managing Labels is because of the many-to-many relationship with messages and threads wherein a single message or thread may have multiple labels applied to it and a single label may be applied to multiple messages or threads.

For this, you can try modifying the labels applied to a thread or you can modify which labels are associated with a message or thread to properly sort out your messages.

In addition to that, solutions given in this SO post - Why does search in gmail API return different result than search in gmail website? might also help.

Gmail API retrieves different number of emails than it is displayed in my account

1 Answers1