Would it be possible to create a readonly version, as to reduce the scopes needed?

My admin is being a bit iffy about granting write rights to the organization, just for an automated backup.

I was looking at the scopes and I noticed that `https://www.googleapis.com/auth/gmail.readonly` exists, would it be possible to make a version that only does read-only requests? or is that a large undertaking?

Start by locating the Gmail API request paths and OAuth scope configuration used by the backup flow. Determine which requests are read-only and what must change to support gmail.readonly; done means an automated backup works without organization write permissions and makes no write requests.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.