Grabbing contact list from yahoo, MSN & Gmail

Torrential Web Dev

Sunday, August 6. 2006

Posted by Jonathan Street in Programming at 16:09

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Grabbing contact list from yahoo, MSN & Gmail

I've spent the last couple of hours browsing the web looking for a way to 'super-charge' the refer-a-friend functionality on a project I'm currently playing with. Rather than have users type in the email address of a friend I wanted to grab the email addresses from their yahoo, MSN etc accounts (obviously with their permission) and then allow them to just tick the addresses they wanted to refer.

This entry is one of a series looking at fetching contacts. For a summary of all the important facts, a demo and the download link please view the MSN contact grab page in the scripts section. If you are interested in Gmail contacts there is also a tutorial on grabbing contacts from Gmail



It's not new functionality, it's been seen on numerous community / social network / Web 2.0 -type sites but getting a script capable of achieving this is not easy. They are out there but their developers want $100+ for them. For a project in the stage mine is I'm not prepared to pay that much.

After quite a bit of searching I've been able to find three packages on phpclasses.org which partially meet my needs. Most importantly of all they are all released under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Yahoo contacts grabber (UPDATE: seems to work)
MSN contacts grabber (UPDATE: Couldn't get this one to work)
Gmail contacts grabber (UPDATE: No luck here either)

I haven't yet looked at these packages in detail but hopefully by posting about them other people will be able to find them more quickly in future.

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excellent
#1 sherif on 2007-05-14 11:42 (Reply)
Thanks for this kindness,but it would be better if you provide the code here. It's troublesome to get the code for the first one
#2 Zhaopin (Homepage) on 2007-09-07 21:25 (Reply)
Only Yahoo example works!
#3 Gennadiy on 2007-12-03 17:07 (Reply)
Yes that's right which is why I posted an update by each one so nobody would be confused.

It is also why I continued looking for/working on other msn messenger and gmail contact list importers and these can be found by visiting the 'scripts' section of the site via the top menubar.
#3.1 Jonathan Street (Homepage) on 2007-12-03 18:04 (Reply)
Are there any classes (commercial if there's no other choice) available to grab MSN/Gmail contacts?
#3.1.1 Ken (Homepage) on 2008-03-18 19:05 (Reply)
I managed to make it working.
#4 Upeksha on 2008-11-04 01:46 (Reply)

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