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What is the need for the user ID in: https://api.stackexchange.com/docs/user-inbox

Given that it will only return the inbox of the authenticated user, and deny a mismatching user id.

The only needed route is the Network /users route ( https://api.stackexchange.com/docs/inbox) surely? As the inbox is a Network feature anyway, the site supplied is irrelevant (well judging by the docs and that both routes return the same content?)

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The inbox methods have a number of aliases to aid in their consumption.

/me/inbox is provided for those apps that are single site focused.
/users/{ids}/inbox is provided for symmetry with every other /me method. It is also not inconceivable that access_tokens that can access multiple users will be possible, although there is no way to create them at this time.

Strictly, yeah, you can do all this with just the /inbox method.

Technically /posts/{ids}/comments is covered completely by /questions/{ids}/comments and /answers/{ids}/comments but it makes some use cases easier, so we supply it.

Same logic really.

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  • Ok thanks, I was just wondering if I was missing something, btw there doesn't seem to be vectorised inbox method according to the docs?
    – Jonathan.
    Commented Dec 8, 2011 at 20:29
  • @Jonathan - on the balance I thought it more confusing to call those methods vectorized in the docs while "one user -> one access_token" holds true. Didn't want people trying to pass multiple access_tokens, or the like either.
    – Kevin Montrose
    Commented Dec 8, 2011 at 20:34

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