SendGrid Email Activity API rate limit

user_7195713 0
Viewed 985

In testing code that uses the SendGrid Email Activity API, I have received "too many messages" errors. I have examined the "rate limit" response headers and it appears that I am being limited to 10 requests per 5 minute block in the day. That is, the first 5 minutes of every hour can have 10 requests, the next 5 minutes can have 10 requests, etc.

I asked SendGrid support about this. The first response was pretty generic, but seems to indicate that the threshold is correct and says I really should be using webhooks to get the status. I haven't found anything in the documentation saying this and I haven't seen anything the specifies what the rate limits are.

For those of you using the Email Activity API, are you limited to 10 requests per 5 minutes? If yes, what do you do with the API?

sendgrid-api-v3 sendgrid
3 Answers

Here's an snippet of what I ended up using with requests, tenacity and ratelimit:

from ratelimit import limits, sleep_and_retry
import requests
import tenacity

@sleep_and_retry
@limits(calls=2, period=60)
@tenacity.retry(
    retry=tenacity.retry_if_exception_type(requests.exceptions.HTTPError),
    stop=tenacity.stop_after_attempt(10),
    wait=tenacity.wait.wait_fixed(60),
)
def _call_api(headers, params):
    response = requests.get(
        "https://api.sendgrid.com/v3/messages",
        json={},
        headers={},
        params={},
    )
    try:
        response.raise_for_status()
    except requests.exceptions.HTTPError:
        logger.info(f"Request failed {response.headers}, retrying in 1 minute")
        raise
    return response
user_7032170

I received a response from SendGrid support that says:

Your findings are correct in that we do limit this endpoint to 10 requests per 5 minutes. This is a hard limit that we do not have the means of raising. The Email Activity Feed as well as the Email Activity API endpoint are meant for troubleshooting specific issues and attaining detailed message metadata.

user_71957130

I previously found the rate limit to be 10/5min but it appears that SendGrid have changed the rate limit to 2 requests every 60 seconds sometime in the past week. Can anyone confirm this?

I'm using the webhook to report non-delivery back to my application but I also need to use the activity API to resolve async bounce notifications. Async bounces are when a destination mail server accepts a message during the smtp session but subsequently sends a bounce notification email. When this occurs, SendGrid do not provide the detail of the bounced message in the webhook and the message is incorrectly reported as delivered in the SendGrid app. When asked, they respond that there's nothing they can do about it, even though I have explained to them how I use their activity api to resolve this.

I pay extra to use the activity API to fix a problem that they should address themselves, so I'm very frustrated that they apply such restrictive rate limits, then change them without notice.

user_156290880
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