I’m having trouble with the Google Drive API when trying to find files based on user permissions. The issue seems to be related to email domain types.
When I use the Drive API to search for files where a specific user has read access, it works fine for Gmail addresses but fails completely for other email providers like Yahoo or Outlook.
Here’s what I’m experiencing:
$fileList = $driveService->files->listFiles([
'q' => "'[email protected]' in readers"
]);
This query returns no results even though the Yahoo email is clearly listed in the file’s permission settings.
However, when I change it to:
$fileList = $driveService->files->listFiles([
'q' => "'[email protected]' in readers"
]);
It works perfectly and returns the expected files.
Both email addresses are valid and have proper permissions set on the files. Is this a known limitation of the Google Drive API? Should I just iterate through all files manually to check permissions instead of using the query parameter?
yeah, i’ve hit this too. google drive api gets weird with non-gmail accounts in searches. grab the permission id from permissions.list() first, then use that id instead of the email in your search. way more reliable than emails for external domains.
This happens because Google handles non-Gmail accounts differently in their search indexing. External email addresses just don’t work reliably in direct queries. I ran into this exact problem last year when building a document sharing platform. The fix is simple - use permission IDs instead of email addresses. First, call the permissions endpoint to grab the permissionId for your target email, then use that ID in your search query. Permission IDs work consistently across all email providers since they skip the messy email-to-identity conversion that breaks with external domains. Yeah, it’s an extra API call, but it’ll fix those reliability issues you’re dealing with.
Yeah, this is a known quirk with the Drive API. The ‘in readers’ search gets weird with external email domains because of how Google handles non-Google accounts internally. I hit this exact problem about six months ago on a client project. What actually works is a two-step approach: run a broader query first to get all files, then filter programmatically by checking each file’s permissions list. Sure, it’s more API calls, but the performance hit isn’t bad unless you’re dealing with thousands of files. You can also try using the permission ID instead of the email address in your query - just resolve the email to its permission ID through the permissions endpoint first. The API handles permission IDs way more consistently across different account types.