I've read the Twitter REST API docs, I know that it says you can fetch 200 at a time to a max of 800. However... I can't. I'm pulling 200, using the last tweet as max_id and then sending another request but I only receive the last tweet from the first request, not the remaining from my supposed 800 limit.
So I did a little research and I found that when I was sending more direct messages from other accounts my other direct messages were disappearing (i.e, if I had 200 received messages from an account called "sup," and I sent 5 messages from an account called "foo," "sup" would only show 195 direct messages and "foo" would show 5. Those 5 messages would disappear from "sup" in both the twitter DM window, as well as from the API calls.
I'm using Twython to do this, but I don't believe that switching back to requests would change anything, as I can visibly see the messages disappearing from the chat log. Does that mean that Twitter only stores 200 total DM's? Or am I doing something completely wrong.
This is the code I was using to pull for direct messages. Keep in mind that I still don't know how to explain DM's disappearing in the twitter DM console.
test_m = twitter.get_direct_messages(count=200)
i = 0
for x in test_m:
print 'dm number = ' + str(i) + '| dm id= '+ str(x['id']) + ' |text= ' + x['text']
i += 1
m_id = test_m[-1]['id']
test_m_2 = twitter.get_direct_messages(count=200, max_id=m_id)
This code will return test_m as an array of 200 items, and test_m_2 as an array of 1 item, containing the last element of test_m.
Edit: Well, no response yet but I figured I should add that this method successfully returns more than 200 messages for the other api calls I've made (user timeline, mentions timeline, retweets). From my testing I have to assume that only 200 incoming messages are stored by twitter throughout all DM interactions. If I'm wrong, let me know!