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

[Davy Landman]

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?