retrieve email address from inbox

Question

Hi there

Services as linkedin, facebook, etc, can import email addresses(contacts) from my Inbox if I provide my gmail/yahoo password. How are they doing it? Can I do it too, using PHP?

Answer 1

You can use libgmailer for accessing Gmail in PHP

Answer 2

Yes you can. You need imap extension to make your live easier. Here is sample example howto do this for gmail. Yahoo should be similer if not same.

http://davidwalsh.name/gmail-php-imap

Hope that helps. Cheers

Edit: Got questions wrong.sry

Answer 3

The Google Contacts Data API allows you to own your own contact data. We expect the API to be useful for a big range of applications. For example, developers can use it to:

• Import a user's Google contacts into their web or desktop application
• Export their application's contact list to Google
• Write sync applications for mobile devices or popular, desktop-based contact management applications

Answer 4

Use the google contacts API.

Answer 5

ContactGrabber looks like it should work for GMail, Yahoo, Hotmail and other services.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/463410/a-php-api-for-retrieving-mail-from-yahoo-gmail-hotmail