From what I can see so far, the facebook API does not allow you to extract the email address and phone number of your friends - it just returns an empty/null string. If that is the case, how does Hotmail/ Windows Live Mail do it? It allows you to import all of your contacts from facebook, including their email address and phone numbers.
Yahoo and Hotmail have special agreements in place with Facebook to allow syncing with your webmail account. Regular facebook applications don't ever allow access to friend email addresses, only the current users if email permissions are granted.
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Is there an API to look up the same information that I can get from Gmail if I type someone's email address into Gmail's search bar and hit search? For most Gmail addresses, this shows me the person's full name.
I ask for people's email address when they sign up on my website, but not for their names. I'd like to add a personal greeting to the emails that I send out. Note that people have NOT signed up using Google+.
You're looking for the new People API.
I am working on website with symfony where users create a page which is publicly viewable and I need to do something so that the users can send an email to their gmail or yahoo or LinkedIn or Facebook contacts(they can choose to whom the mail should go, it's like sending invitations to their mail contacts) about the site saying all about its greatness. I have no idea on what this process called or how to do this ? Do I need to use any Apis or ?
Usually this is done with several invitation channels:
simple email input field
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/send-button - with Facebook App, but no API call needed, you can just create the code with the code generator
Not sure if there is a possibility to share something with specific LinkedIn accounts, but i assume that you need to use their API: https://developer.linkedin.com/apis
We are developing a mobile application that communicates with a server, which sends a generated email on behalf of the app user to a facebook user.
The user sending the email is signed on to Facebook.
The email is sent to one or multiple FB friends/connection using their id (example: username#facebook.com).
The sender email can be from any domain and that's where the problem lies. Sending directly from gmail for example, works fine. But because our server is sending on behalf of the user, FB thinks its a spoofed email.
Sending the email from the app is not an option for us at this time.
Is there any way or service that would allow us to do this without having our emails marked as spam?
Facebook is transitioning away from the ability to send emails via an
API call on Mar. 1st. To compensate, they allow apps to now ask for a
user's email address directly.
If you set the email domain in your app's settings, then asking for
the email extended permission gives you the users email address
instead the ability to send an email via the API.
As of Mar. 1, the API will stop working and you are left alone to
figure out your own email solution. This goes for regular
notifications, both user to user and app to user, as well
From here
And:
Please note: We are in the process of deprecating the REST API,
and will not be adding support for this in Graph API.
Developers should directly send email to users once they are granted permission.
From here
However, I would suggest rather sending private message than emails, as described here
Update
This was reported to Facebook via https://www.facebook.com/whitehat/report/ on Dec 16th 2013 and Facebook responded on Dec 17th that the bug has long since been fixed.
I have retested this with my Facebook account (that I still haven't verified the email address on) and when using the Grap API Explorer tool it is not possible to get the email address of this account using the Graph API or using a FQL query.
Conclusion: The email address you get from Facebook using the Graph API or a FQL query is a verified email. If an account hasn't verified it's email yet it's not possible to get it.
Original Post
I am making a web app with SSO that is offering the user to sign in with either Google or Facebook. I would like users who have both types of accounts to show up as the same user in my system regardless of which identity they log in with. To achieve this I'm thinking of using the email address as the identifier to know if I should create a new account or if the user already exists.
To not introduce any security problems I must know that the email address is verified and actually belongs to the user. For Google the userinfo API can tell me if an email is verified or not, so there's no problem here. But I can not find anything like this in the Facebook Graph API.
Is it possible to know if an email address is confirmed on Facebook?
I know that there is a verified field, but that only tells if the account is verified and not the email address.
At first it looked like you are only able to use the Graph API for accounts where the email address has been confirmed. If the address wasn't confirmed I just got an error telling me that I had to confirm the email address first before being able to sign in to any third party site.
However this does not seem to be true for all accounts. In some cases it's possible to get accesses to all parts of Facebook even if you don't have a confirmed email address. One example of this is when you sign up with a #myopera.com mail address.
When you sign up to Facebook with a #myopera.com email address you get a message that your account has been temporarily locked as soon as you submit the sign up form. To continue you need to provide your phone number to verify your account and to "keep Facebook safe and free from spam" (sorry for the Swedish in the screenshot, this was before I could get into Facebook and change language to English):
When you provide your phone number you are logged in and Facebook doesn't nag you any further about that you have to verify your email address.
The only place where you can see that your email address is not yet verified is on the settings page:
The Mobile Settings that is usually not accessible before you have verified your email address is available and lists the phone number entered during sign up:
In addition to this it is also possible to log in to third party sites with an unconfirmed email address:
When I connect to the graph api with this user I can get the unconfirmed email address and the verified field returns true as expected since I have verified the account by adding a phone number. So obviously I can't trust that the email address I get from Facebook really belongs to the user that has the Facebook account.
Is there any other way of knowing if the email address is verified or not or do I have to verify it myself if I want to use it for identifying the user?
I was looking for an official Facebook statement regarding this issue and finally i found this: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-login/multiple-providers#postfb1, which clearly says that developer should not rely on the fact that email address is verified.
I've never used it, but you may be able to check with a FQL query of the user.email_hashes: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/fql/user
I'm trying to build a web application in which users can invite their friends by using their email accounts (just like facebook). I use OAuth so that users don't need to enter password in my app. The problem is that I cannot figure out what is the correct YQL query to fetch contact names and email addresses from Yahoo social tables, and achieve the same result with facebook's Find Friends feature.
At first I used this:
SELECT * FROM social.contacts(0, 500) WHERE guid=me
With this query I hope I can get all contacts of the current logged in user, at once. But after parsing and selecting only records which have email field, the result list is far less than when I'm using facebook's Find Friends. I guess facebook does not only using Contacts tables, but also Profile tables, as I see it in the Yahoo authorization page when granting access permission to my private data.
So what is the correct YQL query to get all contact names and email addresses, using these two tables ?
After trying some tests, I discovered that when I import email addresses from my Yahoo contacts, Facebook automatically guesses the contact's email address in case that contact does not have an email field, by appending #yahoo.com to its yahooid field. As I see, this is totally wrong. Because with a yahooid, say "john123", the associated email may have an international domain like john123#yahoo.co.uk, john123#yahoo.com.vn etc.
I have a friend in my Yahoo contacts list. He has a yahooid which associates with a #yahoo.com.vn email address. Before importing my Yahoo contacts into Facebook, I made sure that there is no email field in his contact entry, just a name and a yahooid field. After importing into Facebook, Facebook determines my friend's email address as a #yahoo.com email. Of course the Facebook invitation mail never reach him.
And so, the answer to my question is: there is nothing wrong with my YQL. Facebook can fetch more email addresses than I do, but many of them are incorrect.