Get Email Addresses from users mail contacts

William Shoap Posted in Component Development 3 years ago

After launching 3 weeks ago, I have about 200 members. This is ok. The life blood of social networks is membership growth and momentum. Momentum in growth is aided by ease of sharing. OSSN “Invite Friends” could use a simple change, which would be the addition of a button to import email addresses from the users gmail account, hotmail account or one or more of the BIG free email providers that people most commonly have. This would make it far easier for the end users who won’t use the Invite Friends function because it takes too many steps to copy and past emails. The Invite Friends works good, but adding this would help our social networks spread faster. This is feedback from some of my users. I have seen many php scripts listed on the internet that can do this. They don’t look long and cumbersome. I am wondering if one of these can be used under a button event to pull valid email addresses, preview them, allow the user to delete the addresses he doesn’t want and put them in comma separated form in the text box.

Replies
us William Shoap Replied 3 years ago

Yeah, I would force a 50 user limit per day or whatever makes sense. The PHP component would have to know which people were already invited and/or are already users and then allow the user to select up to 50 people per day that are not on those lists. Something like that. The site administrator would control the user limit per day.

Indonesian Arsalan Shah Replied 3 years ago

I know about the API it will still import email addresses and put inside invites field to send invitation. Besides that you can not trust user he can invite 10K users and you'll be blocked by provider, these type of things can be created but we need to take care of people with normal hosting providers they may use these blindly and ended up to account termination.

us William Shoap Replied 3 years ago

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us William Shoap Replied 3 years ago

For Starters, here is the API document for Google. https://developers.google.com/people
It appears it would use the user gmail address as a ID to retrieve attributes from the users contact list.

Indonesian Arsalan Shah Replied 3 years ago

Ok, i am here telling about my contacts list a email contacts list in my mailbox (not a emails) I have 50K almost contact list.

us William Shoap Replied 3 years ago

Also, in reference to Arsalan's statement, the user would have to singularly pick up to N number of users one at a time to add to their list.

us William Shoap Replied 3 years ago

I think I misunderstand your question. I now realize you are talking about the user's email account and not those he is inviting. So, I think the answer will be a few different scenarios.

  1. Access the users local email on their computer or mobile (this is probably reveal in the scripts that I will post)
  2. Direct access to the users contacts by use of the email address that is bound to their account. Again, I think the scripts will reveal ways in which this is done.
Indonesian Arsalan Shah Replied 3 years ago

Well I look at bigger picture first, my email have around 50K emails (distinct) and I wouldn't just export them because this way your hosting provider will surely suspend your account sending 50K invitations 🤣 🤣🤣🤣

us William Shoap Replied 3 years ago

Thank you for responding, by the way.

OSSN would not necessarily need to "know" if the email addresses belong to a current user, just like it does not know now. Currently, if I place [email protected] in the "Invite Friends" list, [email protected] may already exist under a current user account. So, however OSSN is handling that now seems to be fine. I will find you the php scripts and post them here.