Question

I have written an entire application to do one and only one thing, notify the people on a shared folder in drive that a new file has been added to the folder. the fact i had to write the application is baffling to me but whatever.

The person generating the content clicks on the notify button when he adds a new file, which on a good day would be about 2 or 3 hundred times, the system will go out, find the new files, get the list of people its shared with based on the folder, and generate an email for those people saying their file is ready to download via the link in the email.

my problem is he starts work about 8 in the morning and about 9 in the morning he gets a notification that he has hit the email quota for the day.

so, just to save time let me answer some of the mundane questions

1. he has a google apps for business account
2. no, he can not simply click the notify button less each day. he typically works on
   a 5 to 15 minute turn around time for the files
3. in a given year he averages about 14,000 files added to the system with 200 clients
   and i would guess about 600 emails a day.
4. yes, i have rewritten the app several times now to minimize the number of times the api’s are called. I can’t go any less than i am currently calling them because the toolset just isn’t that good.
5. the server that ran this system previously was a P4 1 gig processor with 2 gigs of ram
   and a 500 gig hard drive that sits in his basement on the end of a
   128k ISDN line. that server handled this task well for over 10
   years, i think google can handle the load
6. none of his clients have gmail accounts to be notified of new files as a shared folder

i have his credit card ready to upgrade the quota for the gmailapp api and the driveapp api inside the google app script language and i only need to know what screen to enter it to upgrade these quotas.

Am i going to have to rewrite this app yet again as a GAE app to make this work as expected?

thanks

Answer 1

As an update, it turns out no-one is sure if these limits can be increased. Therefor I rewrote the app in GAE. At least with that framework and Drive API, if he ever hits any of the limits for the free account, he can be back up and running in minutes with a credit card, not have his entire business unceremoniously shut down for 24 hours with App Script.

Thank you all