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how is this done?

Posted: Sat Oct 29, 2005 4:38 pm
by s.dot
How is it done when sites have an 'import address book' from yahoo, gmail, aol, and msn..?

Its supposed to take their contacts and send an email invitation to join their website. I'm not sure how to grab someones address book? Or really the mechanics behind this.

Posted: Sat Oct 29, 2005 4:46 pm
by s.dot
one that works like this:

http://www.improsys.com/contacts/index.php

I am only interested in grabbing email addresses though.

Posted: Sat Oct 29, 2005 5:00 pm
by deltawing
Hmmm... presumably, it logs in to Hotmail or whatever for you, actually accessing the website and submitting the username and password in form information. Then it would parse the webpage that lists the contacts. I don't know the actual code required to do an HTTP request, but it can be done. I would never give any website my password though. How do you know they don't save it? And then someone might go snooping around your account. The way gmail does it is much better. They get you to export your contact information from another address to CVS, then you submit that, and its that which is parsed. Much less of a security problem. How exactly you do that is more of a coding problem than a "theory and design" problem, whci I'm sure you can work out with a little research.

Posted: Sat Oct 29, 2005 5:03 pm
by sweatje
Many times they just tell you to use some sort of a "export as csv" feature from the original site. It is easy to then let the user upload a csv file, and parse it (from the know format because you can export too) and then instert the contacts into your system.

HTH

Posted: Sat Oct 29, 2005 5:05 pm
by alex.barylski
I reckon it's done via SOAP...

http://code.google.com/apis.html

Not exactly what your after, but it might be a start :)

HTH