I’m prototyping an app on top of the Gmail API. As the docs state, both the message.list and threads.list methods only return a few metadata fields for returned messages/threads, and it’s required to call {messages,threads}.get on individual message/thread IDs to get, for example, the subject of the thread.
In my prototyping it seems to make it more difficult to build a responsive app, because, let’s say you want to show the user the 100 most recent messages. I call threads.list, and then have to make 100 API calls for each thread to get the subject, number of messages in each thread, etc. Am I understanding the API correctly, or is there another way I am not aware of? Thanks a lot in advance.
You’re correct — messages.list and threads.list only return minimal metadata by default. To reduce the extra get calls, you can use the format=full or format=metadata query parameter with messages.list or threads.list to include headers like Subject in the initial response. For example:
GET https://gmail.googleapis.com/gmail/v1/users/me/threads?maxResults=100&format=metadata
```
This way you can fetch the most recent threads with key headers in a single request, then only call `threads.get` when you need the full body or additional details. Keep in mind that even with `format=metadata`, you’ll still need to parse the headers array to extract the subject.
Thanks and regards,
Taz