Webmail Contact List Importer

Question

Does anyone know of a Webmail Contact List Importer scripts (ColdFusion, PHP etc) like those used on Twitter and LinkedIn ? I've found some but they are paid for and I want some more bespoke & open.

To clarify a little more I'm not looking for a way to process .csv files :) I'm looking for a bit of code that can logging into gmail, yahoo mail, hotmail, aol and pull out the users address book.

Matt H · Accepted Answer · 2009-05-22T15:15:19.970

4

Are you actually after a method where a user enters their webmail username and password into your site and then your site goes off and grabs contact details from that account? If so, then it sounds like a can of worms to me, and is something that our very own Mr Atwood blogged about a while back.

I'd go with something along the lines of Evgeniy's answer.

(I would have just commented on the question but my woeful rep prevents me...)

(Edited to include the link to Jeff's blog now that I'm allowed)

edited May 22 '09 at 15:15

answered May 22 '09 at 10:36

Matt H

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You can't add a hyperlink? You should be able to... Anyway, this is the page you're referencing: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000953.html – Adam Tuttle May 22 '09 at 13:20
That's the fella - thanks. I suspect 'new user' status is defined by your rep, since even though I joined 8 months ago I still get the 'new users can't add hyperlinks' message. Oh well, best get answering more questions :-) – Matt H May 22 '09 at 13:30
Is there any reason Andy would need to store the password? Or could his webpage submit to the backend and then be passed through to the api and discarded? I'm not sure that's critical. – Antony May 25 '09 at 10:24
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No, none at all. But the issue is that it's one more instance where a user's password *could* be compromised. What about Andy's log files? If he were to use a 3rd party library, how can he be sure the library treats his users' passwords securely? What if he's *really* unlucky and chooses an evil library which secretly calls home with users' passwords? Lots of ifs and maybes, but they were the kind of worms I was thinking about. – Matt H May 25 '09 at 17:46
Very good points - thanks Matt – Antony May 25 '09 at 23:30

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 03 '09 at 08:24

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try http://openinviter.com/, has the email contact import plus a few social networks built in

answered Jul 03 '09 at 08:24

Jason

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score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 02 '10 at 10:02

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probabily you can try http://stescodes.com/grabcontacts.aspx, it has demo too

it has linkedin and myspace

answered Jun 02 '10 at 10:02

stescodes

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score 1 · Answer 4 · answered May 22 '09 at 15:22

You will likely need to use a library that can log into all of those services, and access their contact lists in their format, and extract them in one format.

In other news, The PHP/Curl book seems to have it all done for $25 cost of the book. I would suspect whatever the code is in PHP, it would be about half with Coldfusion.

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered May 22 '09 at 10:14

What format does it use for contact list? If CSV, then you can write it in 1 minute...

$data = file('list.csv');
$contacts = array();
foreach ($data AS $entry)
{
    $contacts[] = explode($separator, $entry); // usually separator is ';'
}

add here error handling and name the fields after exploding - and that's it!

score 0 · Answer 6 · answered May 22 '09 at 13:22

What format does it use for contact list? If CSV, then you can write it in 10 seconds...

<cfhttp
    url  = "http://localhost/list.csv"
    name = "Contacts"
/>

And that handles all the escaping and column naming for you, giving a nice convenience Query to work with.

;)

Webmail Contact List Importer

6 Answers6