The Nylas platform
Learn about platform SLAs, security options, rate limits, and data retention.
The Nylas API makes it easy to connect and sync mail, calendar, and contact data from any email service provider. Nylas does not send email or create calendar events itself, rather it uses the provider APIs to do it for you. This makes Nylas transparent to the provider.
Nylas API and sync architecture
The diagram below represents how your application can use the Nylas API to sync data from providers such as Google and Microsoft.
Your application uses Nylas to send requests to create, read, update, and delete objects from the provider. Nylas also monitors the provider for changes on each authenticated account, and sends those changes to your application so it can send notifications and react appropriately.
Data storage
When you authenticate an account with Nylas, the Nylas sync servers automatically start syncing mail, calendar, and contact data from the provider to the Nylas database. Mail, contact, and calendar data is stored for up to 30 days.
Nylas syncs 30 days of data by default. You can adjust this by updating your historical sync settings.
Raw email
Nylas also caches files, attachments, and copies of the raw RFC-2822 MIME message in an Amazon S3 bucket for seven days. If you request the raw message during those first seven days, Nylas returns the cached copy from S3. After seven days, Nylas deletes the extra copy of the raw message from S3, and if you request the data again, Nylas sends a request to the provider's mail server to re-retrieve the original data.
Performance
Performance Estimation
The statistics below are approximations and actual performance varies per provider. These estimates provide a rough idea to help you design how your application works with the Nylas API. See your service agreement for specific performance guarantees.
| Metric | Value | Description |
|---|---|---|
| API Success Rate | 99.9% | The number of requests that return successful HTTP status codes |
| P90(request_time) | Less than 500 ms | P90 of request_time to various API endpoints |
| TT50 | 5 min | Average time to sync the first 50 threads during an account's initial sync |
| TT500 | 25 min | Average time to sync the first 500 threads during an account's initial sync |
| Historical Sync Time | 1 day | Average time to sync all historical mail for an account. This is highly variable and depends on how much data is in the account, and the mail server's upstream bandwidth. |
How Nylas syncs customer data
When an account connects to Nylas, the Nylas sync engine starts pulling all of the data it has access to for the account. This could be mail, contacts, or calendars, or any combination of those.
Email data
Nylas prioritizes recent messages, but email isn't always added in reverse chronological order. As new email arrives in the user's mailbox, Nylas syncs it in parallel with historical sync jobs.
Contact and calendar data
Nylas downloads contacts and events from newest to oldest. However, new events or contacts added after the initial sync starts have to wait. They are downloaded after the initial sync finishes.
How Nylas keeps your data up-to-date
To keep your data in sync with your provider, Nylas
- Keeps an IMAP
IDLEconnection open with the provider. - Exchanges ActiveSync's ping notifications.
- Uses webhooks from calendar providers.
- Polls the provider for new changes.
Syncing transactional email providers
When Nylas syncs transactional emails, such as Sendgrid or Mailgun, it saves a copy on the IMAP server. This means your customer also sees the email messages appear in their email provider account.
Platform uptime SLA guarantees
For customers who require high availability, Nylas offers uptime guarantees for the Core and Plus plans. Contact your Nylas representative for more information.
Business Associate Agreements
Nylas also offers a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) for customers who require them for HIPAA or HITECH compliance. For more details, see the Nylas Security whitepaper.
Static IPs
As a cloud-based service, Nylas uses dynamic IPs by default when connecting to your app and clients. Customers on paid plans can use a GET /a/{client_id}/ip_addresses request to discover these.
Nylas can also accommodate implementations that require static IPs so the Nylas servers can be added to an allowlist. Contact your Nylas representative for more information.