Yammer API - missing messages

Question

We have developed an application to extract data from Yammer using the Yammer APIs. We're authenticating using the verified admin's credentials. According to the data export CSV file we know that there are some 25K messages in the network, but we only get 10K messages via the API. Initially thought that the difference was private messages, but the missing messages are a mix of private and public messages.

The API call we are using is: https://www.yammer.com/api/v1/messages.json . We are using the 'older_than' parameter to scan through all the messages.

In the end we had to query the missing messages individually but that is not a very efficient process.

Any ideas about what we could be doing wrong, or why the APIs are missing to many messages?

Answer 1

I'm experiencing the same issue. Even by respecting the API Rate limits there are some messages that are not retrieved. By using /api/v1/messages/about_topic/ I can get them all.

The issue is not linked to the age of messages. Most of the missing ones a quite new.

Answer 2

You can't download all messages via the API call you're using.

Reference https://stackoverflow.com/a/19107426/4099849

If you attempt to iterate over messages you will hit some limits. These limits are technical in nature and you would need to revert to the search API to find much older messages. Unfortunately you will have to put up with these limitations if you are dealing with the free version of Yammer as the data export is only available with the paid version.