API for getting contacts and sending email s

is there any api to get hotmail, yahoo and gmail contacts

[cayetanob]

Hi,

In Social websites like metroflog, or others, when you register and wirte you hotmail or yahoo or gmail login and passwords, they get your contacs, and beside that they send an email from you to your friends.

My question is, Is there any api or others methos to get the contacts, and to send and email from anothers email?

Regards
Cayetano

[aspdaddy]

Hotmail WebDav & Screen scrapes for the others.

[jtara]

when you register and wirte you hotmail or yahoo or gmail login and passwords

Users are stupid enough to do that? These sites are stupid enough to ask?

Is this true?

I checked the site mentioned, and their privacy policy and FAQ says nothing about this, nor could I find any other reference to this. I didn't go beyond the first page of te sign-up procedure, though.

I'd think that most users would be extremely reluctant to provide their email password to a third party. But maybe I just don't grasp the extent to which people are willing to give up their privacy in the name of "social networking".

I'm pretty sure screen-scraping would be a violation of the TOS for GMail.

I would get good legal advice and good liability insurance before doing this.

Sending your friends an email from your address is the easy part. It's one of the flaws of the current Internet email standards. There are no checks made on the "from" and "reply-to" addresses - only the "envelope sender". So, it's not even necessary to go through the user's mail server to do that. Simply put the user's email address in the "from" header, and send through your own server. The recipient (if they are interested and knowledgeable) will be able to determine that the email was not sent by the sender's normal server (that's a good thing, unless the sender has something devious in mind), but replies will be sent to them, which is the intent.

[aspdaddy]

Its very common for these sites to ask for user/pass and send invites. WebDav is designed to support stuff like this, its just another form of API.

The biggest one in the UK has features to import Email Addresses from your Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, Gmail, MSN, Live.com or Comcast address book. You are asked for your email address and password to do it.

[gcaraballo]

There is an API developed in PHP to access your Hotmail and Yahoo accounts and get the contacts / emails / send emails / see folders

<snip>
Best regards,
Gabriel

[edited by: engine at 12:37 pm (utc) on Mar. 27, 2008]
[edit reason] No urls, thanks [/edit]

[aspdaddy]

I think you mean there is PHP code available to connect to the Hotmail and Yahoo API's ? The code is easy to write yourself if you download the relevant SDK.

The Windows Live Contacts API is fully documented in the Windows Live SDK and states:

Enable developers to programmatically submit queries to and retrieve results from the Windows Live Contacts address book database