logging into gmail,yahoo,hotmail with php

to find friends list

[Jaunty Edward]

Hi,

I have realised there is this new trick around these days, All these so called networking sites are using(tagged,orkut).. they somehow login to the mail account(after taking username and password from user) and then pull out all details from address book....

I dont think all users have IMAP and POP activated then how do they do it....

any clue? any link to a tutorial will be great help.

Thanks
bye

[joelgreen]

They simulate login using provided login/password, and grab address book from the page. For email system it looks like surfer logged in via browser. This is tricky thing though because different email servers behave differently and script would need to handle all the redirects/cookies/sessions.

[eelixduppy]

There are a couple of these types of scripts and classes at the open-source script repositories; your best bet is to look there first. A quick search at phpclasses yields this [google.com]. You can try hotscripts, sourceforge, freshmeat, etc...