Get the age of a Gmail account

Question

My team is discussing how we can improve the fraud prevention algorithms on a customer's platform. It's not surprising that email addresses used in fraudulent activities are often registered with free mail providers such as Gmail.

One criterion that we are missing as an input to our fraud prevention system, which would give us very valuable information, is the age of an account.

Is there an API method (or any other way) that would allow us to query when a Gmail account was registered?

Something like https://api.gmail.com/age-of-account/[email protected], which returns the date of or timespan since creation, would be very useful.

Answer 1

You cannot get when an account was created through any existing Google API. You could probably get rid of a lot of low hanging fruit with something along these lines though, using the Gmail API:

1. List message ids until there is no nextPageToken in the response. Then you will have gotten the last page of message ids.
2. Get the last message and check if the internalDate is lower than some cut-off value.

This is no great solution, since a targeted attacker could just insert a message with a custom Date-header, but might be worth having as a metric of many others in your algorithm.