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Use cases → Email operations

Monitor a shared mailbox for SLA breaches with a service account

Track incoming mail to a shared address and flag messages that breach response SLAs, using delegated workspace access.

Who it is forOps teams responsible for SLA compliance on group or support mailboxes.
APIsGmail API
Typical scopesgmail.readonly

The problem

Shared mailboxes often miss SLA targets because nobody is reliably polling for new messages or tracking response times. Manual monitoring is error-prone and does not scale, and ad-hoc scripts miss edge cases.

How it works

  1. Delegate access to the shared mailbox using a service account with domain-wide delegation.
  2. Poll for new messages at a fixed interval, recording message IDs and received timestamps.
  3. For each message, check if it has a corresponding sent reply within the SLA window.
  4. Flag and log any message breaching the SLA, with full context for follow-up.

What changes

Breaches are flagged consistently regardless of mailbox activity, and every missed SLA is auditable after the fact.

The trap in this one. The Gmail API's history and message list endpoints do not guarantee strict ordering with respect to message receipt and label changes. If you poll too frequently, you can miss messages that arrive just before or during label transitions (e.g., 'INBOX' to 'STARRED' or 'UNREAD' to 'READ'), and the same message may appear or disappear between consecutive calls. This leads to silent gaps in your SLA tracking unless you maintain an explicit, persistent set of message IDs seen and handled, not just rely on polling windows.

Questions people ask

Can I use push notifications instead of polling?

Gmail push notifications (watch) can reduce polling load, but they are subject to delays and can miss rapid-fire changes. Always reconcile with a backup poll.

What about conversations with multiple threads?

Track at the individual message level, not just thread, to avoid missing replies that don't reset the SLA for earlier messages.

Want this built?

This is a pattern we run in production. We will set up the delegation and build this on top of it — $500 per hour, most of it working the same day.

Talk to us Or read the setup guide

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