Connect a mailbox, import the last 500 — not the last ten years
I connected my own Gmail to SpiderMail™ and watched it start working through a decade of mail.
Nothing was broken. That was the problem.
What it used to do
The poller fetched about 100 messages every five minutes, per mailbox, and never stopped walking backwards. That is roughly 28,800 messages a day. A 100,000-message archive is fully ingested in about three and a half days.
There was a cap on speed. There was no cap on scope. Nowhere in the product could you say "just the last 500".
That stayed invisible for a long time, and the reason is dull. Every mailbox connected until then was a service account with almost no history. My own inbox was the first real personal archive we had ever connected, and it exposed the gap in an afternoon.
What it does now
You choose how much history to import, at the moment you connect:
the last 100, 300, 500 or 1,000 messages
everything since a date you pick
or the whole archive, if that is what you want
New mailboxes now default to the last 500. Not everything.
"Everything" is still available. It sits behind a disclosure, and expanding it shows you the cost before the option becomes selectable: about 100 messages every five minutes, so a 100,000-message mailbox takes roughly three and a half days.
The part that matters
This is a floor on where fetching starts. It is not a filter applied after the fetch.
That distinction is the whole point. A post-fetch filter would still pull your old mail across the wire, store it, and then hide it from you. A floor means the request is never made at all. Your older mail stays where it is.
I measured this rather than asserting it. On a mailbox set to the last 500, across about 140 consecutive poll cycles over 12 hours, the poller made 7,640 fetch attempts. Zero of them fell below the floor. The method: every fetch attempt in the poller log, compared against the floor stored on the mailbox. The same measurement before the change found 354 attempts below it. Measured 2026-08-06.
Widening the scope later backfills the gap. Narrowing it does not delete mail you already have — removing stored mail stays a separate, explicit action.
Polling is per-mailbox now too
Every mailbox used to share one five-minute schedule, set by a single environment variable. Each mailbox now carries its own interval, with a floor of 60 seconds and a ceiling of 24 hours. The floor is there so nobody sets 10 seconds and gets themselves rate-limited by their own provider.
Mailboxes that were already connected did not change. As of 2026-08-06, 265 of the 266 connected mailboxes carry no interval and no scope setting, and behave exactly as they did before.
Where you can use it
The Add Mailbox dialog in the dashboard, the REST API, and the MCP tools in @spideriq/mcp-mail. The CLI does not carry it yet.