In a Facebook application, is there anyway I can let a user send a message to another user (to his Inbox)? Even if there is no direct access, is there some kind of a link structure I can use such as:
"facebook.com/example?sendTO=user-id" that will prompt a facebook popup to send a message a user?
Joel
You can't send a message to another user via facebook's apis as no function exist for this. The only way to send personal and private messages are via emails (proxified or not), then the user must install your application and accept to share its email.
Just add "messages" in between the link:
If the persons id is https://www.facebook.com/some.one.007 then write
https://www.facebook.com/messages/some.one.007
Thats it.
Related
Is it possible to send a message to a user without the user interacting with the bot first?
I'm using the following guide to retrieve psids from users that have already connected their profile to an app that I own.
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/messenger-platform/connecting-accounts.
For users that have at least one interaction with a page that I also own, I'm able to get their id. For all other users the endpoint returns an empty array.
Im aware of customer matching but is that the only way to achieve this?
You can't send a message by bot before the user initializes the conversation.
Facebook Messanger Bot permits a standard messages, with a 24-hour interval
to reply to a message initiated by a user. In Some specific cases, Facebook permits to send a message after this time.
A message are triggerd when the user either sends a message to a company or clicks a call button for action in Messenger, or when the user requests a message from a company through a plugin, such as send to Messenger.
Check out the policies here : https://developers.facebook.com/docs/messenger-platform/policy-overview
You are correct, customer matching is your only option for this.
Just learned this today, if you have a user's phone number, you can message them unprompted. You also need the pages_messaging_phone_number permission, which you can only get by paying the $99 customer matching fee.
Check the docs on sending to phone numbers here. Customer matching docs here
Is it possible to figure out reliably what the Facebook email of any Facebook user would be? I know earlier this was not possible because not all users had a username. But I believe that has changed since...
I'm trying to figure out a way to let a user send a direct message to their friend through my app. The Request feature is pretty messed up now as you cannot send a custom message, which means most friends are probably going to ignore the request.
The type of messages that I am trying to let my users send to their friends would not be considered spam by Facebook, as these are messages sent directly from the user to their friend, except it is done through the app. But it's pointless if the message just says "Joe wants you to try this app..." The usefulness of an app on the Facebook platform is becoming questionable now.
I think that facebook terms and conditions disallow this...
Facebook messaging (i.e., email sent to an #facebook.com address) is designed for communication between users, and not a channel for applications to communicate directly with users."
Despite your caveat at the end of your post I believe that facebook would consider this a message from your app to the user.
In terms of your question, then the user data returned includes 'username' which is the information you need to create the email address.
Is it possible to figure out reliably what the Facebook email of any Facebook user would be? I know earlier this was not possible because not all users had a username. But I believe that has changed since...
Yes, now every user should have a username set – if not by themselves, than FB will have chosen one for them.
Besides that, I think writing to userid#facebook also works.
But I agree with combinatorial’s answer – Facebook explicitly says that this should not be used for app-to-user communication. To judge if your case is OK is up to you – otherwise you might consider using the send dialog instead, that’s more of the “designated” way to have users communicate “through” your app.
If what you are looking for is to give them a new message notification, it is not going to work. Because, if you send an email to the facebook email, it will land in the Others folder in the message box, which is like a spam box.Try mailing your own #facebook id and see what happens.
And Facebook doesnt give any documentation of how to get users #facebook email, most probably because they dont want developers to use it.
Why dont you mail them directly? You can easily get their email by adding email to the scope, and you can catch the email easily too.
$data = file_get_contents("https://graph.facebook.com/me?access_token=xxxxxx");
$data = json_decode($data,true);
$email = $data['email'];
Is that a viable option in your case?
I have a facebook app that needs to allow a user to send a message to multiple friends (potentially all their friends) at once. This isn't any kind of spam, and I don't need the app to send the message incognito (behind the scenes), I just need to open a dialog with specific friends pre-populated (that the user has selected within my app in a prior step) and then send them a custom message. Is this possible? I see the api for sending a message to a single friend, and I see the API for inviting users to my app (but that's limited to some very small number of invitations per day)... what I need is a dialog that lets me send messages to as many of the user's friends as they want, but for me to control *which friends are selected... I don't want to give them control to add/remove from the friends list.
Is this possible?
No, the Send Dialog allows prefilling only a single friend, but would otherwise be the best option here if you need a custom message displayed to the recipient. You could get the user to send to several friends in a loop by prefilling this - or fire the dialog without prefilling and let the user chose who to send to - your app won't receive a callback with the recipient IDs but you could put a referrer param in the URL sent?
Failing that, the Requests dialog / 'invites' are the only thing you can prefill with multiple recipients without the expectation that your app will be shut down for spam shortly thereafter - there's no limit per day on the number of requests sent, but you don't get to set the message shown to the recipient.
In case this is helpful to anyone else, I just found this... it's a relatively new API (still in beta) that allows for (just about) exactly what I was asking for. I've tested it and it appears to work...
https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2012/08/31/reach-users-1-1-with-the-notifications-api/
I want my users to invite their friends by sending them Facebook private massage. I am thinking of using send button, but the problem is that each invitation url is different and unique, so if I use send button to do it, I might need to create many send buttons each of which carries an unique href. I think this should work? But ideally, I want users to just select their friends in a multi friend selector and everything's done by just clicking the sending button. Any ideas?
Thanks for any help!
You can generate a unique URL for the message that includes the IDs for all the users the user wants to send the message to. Then, when the recipient accesses the URL and authenticates themselves, you can cross reference the URL and their User ID to what you have in your database.
Without knowing what the message contains, its purpose and what you want to achieve, this is the best approach I can think of.
You won't be able to tell who the message is actually sent to, as Facebook doesn't return the User IDs in the callback, but if you have read_inbox permissions, you should be able to look the User IDs up that way.
i think an better way to approach this is set up an invite system, have an invitation code field in your register.php that you sign into, store that info in user account database and set an number of times it can be used
I'm adding a private messaging system to my app,
so users could send private message to their friends.
I thought I could use the send dialog, but the link param seems to be required.
Is there any reason to require that property ?
Is there any other way to send private messages ? (Except XMPP Chat)
Thanks.
No, those are your two only options (send dialog and chat api).
You can also let one user write on the other users wall and set the privacy so that only they can view the message, but that is not really what you're after from what I understand (neither is the chat api btw, since it works only if the two users are online at the time).
I found this thread which talks about it in length: how send message facebook friend through graph api using Accessstoken