GMail Atom Feed - Webhook problem

[BulldogLowell]

Is anyone aware of some rate limiting or IP blocking that has occurred at Google from Particle’s VA servers (Ashburn, VA, USA)?

I can easily get the atom feed from my browser:

https://<username>:<password>@mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom/

but I get this when I test:

and:

this all worked before

[Dave]

Hi @BulldogLowell,

Hmm, so a 401 usually means bad credentials, and would be an error coming from Google.

Google Mail Atom Feed error 401 - Ask for Help

Google is really often aggressive about rate limiting, that thread mentions:

 the documentation from google says only 1x access per 10 min ? 
 is it really that strict now ? anyone have any experience with this ?

Maybe just try waiting ~15 minutes or so between requests? The current webhook system will retry requests if they get an error, so it’s possible that’s aggravating the rate limits more.

I checked on our end and I don’t see any unusual rate limiting of requests to Google as far as I know, and those wouldn’t manifest as http error status codes from us. I’m happy to reach out to Google as well if waiting a little longer doesn’t fix it.

Thanks,
David

[KyleG]

@Dave

[KyleG]

Thanks for the help here Dave!

[BulldogLowell]

Thanks Dave, I’m going to try to shut it down for a couple of days and see what happens, along with further limiting my calls.,

I’ll let you know if it restores or not.

Thanks!

[BulldogLowell]

@KyleG / @Dave

So. I was able to find a very easy alternative method to gmail atom feed. I found this tutorial on google script and decided to use it…

Basically, it provides you with a URL that will return the data in the format you request, so I simply altered it to return a JSON:

/*    Gmail Counter by Amit Agarwal   */
/*    Published on 06/17/2013         */

function doGet() {
  
  var cache = CacheService.getPublicCache();
  var counter = cache.get("gmail-counter");
  
  // Cache the counter to stay within the Apps Script quota
  if (!counter) {
    counter = GmailApp.getInboxUnreadCount();
    // Cache the counter value for 20 minutes
    cache.put("gmail-counter", counter, 1200); 
  }
  
  // You can customize the output message
  counter = "{\"unread\":" + counter + "}"  //<<<<<< this bit
    
  // Output the result in plain text format
  return ContentService.createTextOutput(counter)
    .setMimeType(ContentService.MimeType.TEXT);
  
}

then created a new webhook with the URL that Google provided:

{
    "event": "gmail_count",
    "url": "https://script.google.com/macros/s/Xr7wodJdGwRaLW9eNGE6V-nBX_XhRr3z5d3y0G_3d7dl3e03qteT7pmz/exec",
    "requestType": "GET",
	"headers": null,
	"query": null,
	"responseTemplate": "{{unread}}",
	"responseTopic": "{{PARTICLE_DEVICE_ID}}_gmail_count",
	"json": null,
	"auth": null,
	"coreid": null,
	"deviceid": null,
	"mydevices": true
}

and it returns rather a rather pretty little number

Look Mom, no parsing!!!

void gotGmailFeed(const char *event, const char *data)
{
  emailCount = atoi(data);
}

My word clock is happy again!

[KyleG]

That’s great to hear!!

[Dave]

Glad you got it working! Sorry I wasn’t more help!

Thanks,
David

[RobP]

Thats nice. but unfortunately I don’t get the webhook running as you showed here. After configuring the google script it tells me the correct number of unread emails if I use the generated URL.
But after creating the webhook, all I see is an empty data field

Any idea why?

Thanks in advance…

[RobP]

Ok after reading the instruction again carefully its working now fine (especially after setting the script rights to “Anyone, even anonymous” instead of just “Anyone”).