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Receive contacts from email account

many websites, such as twitter, facebook and others, allow users to enter their email id and pwd and “extract” contacts based on this.

Does anyone know how to do this?

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8 answers

Leaving aside ethical issues, a commercial library is available that can do this for you: http://www.octazen.com/product_abimporter.php

The library is available for PHP, .NET, Java, Ruby, and ColdFusion. It supports importing contacts from many different services (including all the main ones).

It costs only about $ 100 per license, works fine and (using the Java version) requires only one line of code to import contacts from any of the supported services:

List<Contact> contacts = SimpleAddressBookImporter.fetchContacts(emailAddress, password)

They have another library that can import friends lists from social networks, although I have not tried this one.

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They log into your account, clear content, or use the open API. In any case, this is not a method that I would implement or use myself, because I would not trust my credentials to anyone. And I think this teaches users to be sloppy with the secrecy of their credentials.

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This is something like OAuth . Google began to accept it . He does not have the same trust problems as a more typical curettage.

Unfortunately, at the moment, people tend to just ask for your password, register as you and clear information that is much less secure, because it gives your site full access to your account. This is not something you should copy, use OAuth or the equivalent where possible.

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APs available:

Yahoo → http://developer.yahoo.com/addressbook/

Google → http://code.google.com/apis/contacts/

Not for AOL (yet).

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I assume that they log into your email account, either through POP3, or the public API, or they know the html formatting of email systems and read the DOM. They then find that you have received and sent emails, and looked at his own user database to find matches.

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Yes I agree. trusting a site with your email credentials is not secure. Especially after what was found by the gmail archiver ( http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/11/1723206&from=rss )

But only from the software POV I was wondering how they did it. perhaps Gmail hotmail and all the others have an API that users can use ... you need to look into it more, I think.

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Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/1276827/

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