Dear friends

I have one project in which i want to extract users contacts by asking their hotmail, yahoo, aol and other major webmail Id and password and then to all contacts extracted i could email them to join as thier friend did so.

I want to know which language it can be performed in, PHP or ASP?.
Please post the code or help me regarding it.

This kind of technique has been used in stumbleupon.com
and few other poplular website.
I be waiting for your replies.
Best regards
Joey

I've never seen this done in ASP before...and it's not that good an idea anyway. In fact, it's actually pretty silly and potentially dangerous from a spam perspective.

Think back about 8-10 years ago when "email a friend" or "recommend this site" scripts were popular. Do you see them used that much anymore? No, because of the spam implications. Whether the "friend" realizes it or not, they're generating a UCE to someone on their list...and in some cases, a "friend" could spam others with information completely unrelated to your site.

The whole gathering of a Hotmail/Yahoo/AOL user ID/password not only has spam implications, it has security implications as well. People shouldn't be giving out their passwords to complete strangers online, even for something like this. It's a bad idea, and unfortunately the cat's out of the bag and people will get burned by this as long as the Internet exists.

Yep, definately wouldn't want to give out my password for other sites like that, let alone give out my contacts list. Though if you still want to do it I would go about it like this:

1) Use PHP and cURL
2) Figure out the cookies and sessions which get used using something like fiddler (google it)
3) Replicate the process using cURL and PHP to get to the page with my contacts
4) Mine my contact data from hotmail or whatever service is available

Although I think some of these if not most use XML to transfer the data so if you can get that instead of what is on screen all the better.

Good Luck.

It could be done in asp or php with about equal amounts of work. It shouldn't be done in either, or at all, for the reasons Adam mentioned. And you should give him TP for saving you from a potential lawsuit over the CAN SPAM act.

ok, yea it can be used for spam but i dont think he could really get sued over it, as so many (fully established and much more popular) sites are doing EXACTLY the same thing...

Dan.

OK i completed agree with adam and dan.But if u want to extract contact details like emailID it can be done equally easily in ASP and PHP. But i am not clear why u want to extract pasword
rgds
bil

Originally Posted by dansgalaxy

ok, yea it can be used for spam but i dont think he could really get sued over it, as so many (fully established and much more popular) sites are doing EXACTLY the same thing...

Dan.

...and where do you find most of the emails generated by these "popular sites"?

Here's a hint: look for the word "SPAM-(low/med/high)" in your subject header or your junk mail folder. A lot don't even make it that far.

People kept telling me I need to set up a MySpace profile to gain publicity for my photos, and like an idiot, I took the common advice. I get more spam through MySpace than anyone else ... some idiot joins, creates a profile, invites a thousand people to their "friend list" and MySpam sends out emails to each of them.

My gmail account does a wonderful job of stopping spam, but these are addressed directly to me, so they pass through. It's never actually someone interested in my photos ... some 21 year old nympho girl who's account has already been yanked for spam. I delete emails from MySpace on sight.

yes okay when they over send email its very bad but it is still something people want... so instead of moaning anyone feel like telling us how its done?

niceguy.. we would need their password to login to the msn servers to retrieve their friends list..