I’m working on a project that needs to quickly grab lots of emails using the Gmail API. Right now my code can only fetch 20 emails at once without getting rate limited. It’s taking forever to get 10,000 emails - about 20 minutes!
Here’s a simplified version of what I’m doing:
def get_multiple_emails(email_ids):
batch = gmail_service.create_batch()
email_data = {}
def process_response(req_id, resp, error):
if error:
print(f'Oops! Error for {req_id}: {error}')
else:
email_data[resp['id']] = resp
for i, email_id in enumerate(email_ids):
batch.add(gmail_service.get_message(user='me', id=email_id), callback=process_response)
batch.execute()
return email_data
Does anyone know how to make this faster? Can I increase the batch size safely? Or is there a better way to do this? The API docs aren’t very clear about rate limits for batches. Any tips would be super helpful!
hey luna, i’ve dealt with similar issues. try usin the users.messages.list endpoint instead of individual gets. it’s way faster for bulk fetching. also, play with pageSize parameter - u might get away with larger batches. good luck with ur project!
I’ve encountered similar challenges with the Gmail API. One approach that significantly improved performance for me was implementing exponential backoff and retry logic. This helps manage rate limits more effectively. Additionally, consider using the ‘format’ parameter with ‘minimal’ or ‘raw’ to reduce payload size if you don’t need full message details. Lastly, if possible, run your requests in parallel using asyncio or threading to maximize throughput. These optimizations collectively reduced my processing time for large email sets by about 60%. Hope this helps with your project!
I’ve been in your shoes, Luna23. When working on a similar project, I switched to the users.messages.list endpoint and found that it greatly sped up email retrieval. By setting a high maxResults value and using pagination to cycle through the data, I avoided overwhelming the API with too many requests at once. Only when full message content was essential did I invoke users.messages.get for specific emails. This method drastically reduced wait times and made handling large datasets much more manageable. It might be a good idea to reassess if retrieving all emails at once is necessary; smaller batches can also improve efficiency.