#3155 ✓resolved
Ed Cottrell

Gmail throttling preventing app from functioning

Reported by Ed Cottrell | November 23rd, 2022 @ 02:50 AM

I am using MailMate to sync mail on 7 accounts. Three of those are either Gmail or Google Workspaces accounts. One is nearly empty, but the other two contain quite a bit of data (~50k and ~3k emails, respectively). These two accounts get throttled constantly, to the point that my various rules are unreliable; I can't be confident that emails in my inbox when I look at Gmail on the web have been processed by MailMate, nor can I be confident that emails in my inbox according to MailMate haven't already been archived in Gmail. In fact, it's gotten to the point that these two accounts are almost always out of sync between MailMate and the Gmail web interface. I've already taken nearly all of the folders under each account offline, which has helped slightly, but I still get throttled after a few minutes.

A big part of why I bought MailMate was to automate mail-handling for these two accounts. Because of the throttling and out-of-sync problems, though, I can't really use the application.

Can you please provide some guidance here?

Comments and changes to this ticket

  • benny

    benny November 25th, 2022 @ 02:26 PM

    First of all, it should be sufficient to set the “Manual” synchronization schedule on the account itself (top-level under Sources in the mailbox list). This should be inherited by everything but the INBOX and possibly All Mail. The “Manual” state will still trigger synchronization whenever needed, e.g., when selecting a mailbox or moving messages.

    Now, I'm a but surprised it doesn't leave the “throttled” state if you have so little online. If possible, keep the account offline for 24 hours to give it a non-throttled start. If it then still returns then I suspect some kind of busy-looping with the account. Do you have any persistent spinners for the account(s)?

  • Ed Cottrell

    Ed Cottrell November 30th, 2022 @ 02:24 PM

    Hi Benny,

    I've set the accounts themselves to Manual sync and shut down MailMate entirely to give all of the accounts a 24-hour break. I'll update after seeing if that improved things.

    I don't have any constant spinners; the spinners appear at roughly the intervals I'd expect for ordinary checking of mail.

    Sorry for the delayed response; I tried to respond by email, but Lighthouse bounced it.

  • Ed Cottrell

    Ed Cottrell December 1st, 2022 @ 12:19 AM

    Unfortunately, both accounts got throttled again.

    I'm wondering if maybe this is "busy looping" in the sense you described because of my rules? I have a rule that is supposed to run on all messages with a certain tag, (1) add them to DEVONthink, (2) flag them with a certain color, (3) remove that tag, and (4) add a different tag. This should be triggered only about 10 times per day, but maybe it's going haywire somehow? A couple of times in the past, it has started looping and adding the same email to DEVONthink repeatedly.

  • benny

    benny December 5th, 2022 @ 10:33 AM

    Looping would be bad and if you have a fast connection it could likely lead to throttling pretty fast. You should have a persistent spinner in MailMate (for the account under Sources) if this happens. You might not notice that since when it's throttled MailMate will delay most actions and the spinner would possibly stop.

    It would be interesting with activity logs covering the time before going into the throttled state, but currently MailMate doesn't make it easy for you to detect when this happens. Maybe I should add a debug variable which would show an alert when an account goes from non-throttled to the throttled state. That would allow you create logs immediately after. Would you be willing to try that for me?

    (With respect to Lighthouse: There's various problematic issues using the service, but it's free so I don't like to complain. It's on my todo to decide on an alternative.)

  • Ed Cottrell

    Ed Cottrell December 13th, 2022 @ 02:21 AM

    I think I've figured this out; it looks like it was, in fact, a loop: two rules were both trying to process certain messages, and I think the second was causing the first to see it as needing processing again. I've tweaked the rules to make sure that the messages in question only get processed once, and I haven't had any spinners or throttling in the last couple of hours.

  • benny

    benny December 15th, 2022 @ 10:33 AM

    • State changed from “new” to “resolved”

    Great, let me know if the issue returns.

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