How many direct messages does twitter store?

Question

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!

Answer 1

Brian,

Twitter stores more than the last 200 messages, if you were to delete 1 of the Direct messages using destroy_direct_message, then you can access 1 addition old direct Message.

Deleting 100 old Direct Messages will give you access an additional 100 messages etc.

I neither make max_id nor page work either. not sure if the bug it in Twython or Twitter ;-(

JJ

Answer 2

Currently, the API stands you can get up to the latest 3200 tweets of an account but only the 200 latest received direct messages (direct_messages endpoint) from a conversation or the 800 latest sent direct messages (direct_messages/sent endpoint).

To answer your question, I do not think there is a limitation of the number of direct messages "stored" by Twitter. Recently, I have been able to retrieve a complete conversation with more than 17000 direct messages (and all the uploaded media) using this tool that I have created for this purpose.