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How To Mass Export All Of Your Facebook Friends’ Private Email Addresses

199 points| siddhant | 15 years ago |techcrunch.com | reply

38 comments

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[+] donohoe|15 years ago|reply
Have tried this in Firefox, Safari and Opera - both in Classic and New Mail environments.

Always ends up with 0 imported contacts. Makes me wonder if Facebook have disabled this for now... ?

[+] hrabago|15 years ago|reply
This probably has to do with your privacy settings. I set it up so applications can get as little information from my profile as possible (though I hardly use any apps anyway). I tweaked them temporarily to get this to work, got my contacts, then undid my tweaks to regain data privacy.
[+] Sephr|15 years ago|reply
I had the same results as you in all of those browsers a week ago when I tried this. I'm not that sure that Facebook just disabled this now.
[+] lewi|15 years ago|reply
Does anyone else find this amusing?

Facebook is so hypocritical, "We wont let you export your friends email addresses" but when there's money/profitable partnerships involved sure go ahead take all you want.

Michael was correct to append the second statement with "unless it’s with a partner that’s making it worth our while." This just shows the arrogance of Facebook these days!

Apart from that just exported 568 contacts :D

[+] MichaelApproved|15 years ago|reply
I was able to do this but I could only get 184 out of 221 contacts. Not sure what happened to the others. Could it be that they don't have an email address associated with their account?
[+] w1ntermute|15 years ago|reply
All users have an email address associated with their account (for registration and login). Like zzleeper said though, some are probably hidden.

Also, you may have gotten multiple addresses for a single contact. For example, I created my Facebook account when I was in high school using my Gmail account, but when I started college, I had to add my college address to join my college network. So my Facebook account contains both my personal and college email addresses.

[+] zzleeper|15 years ago|reply
Maybe their emails are set as hidden..
[+] samueladam|15 years ago|reply
Change your gmail address with your new yahoo email on facebook and it will work.
[+] AgentConundrum|15 years ago|reply
I'm not really sure what the big deal is here. I just tried this, and the only addresses it was able to import were for people with their email addresses set to public (or at least visible to me).

Has Facebook patched the issue already, or does Mike really think it's a security issue to do something automatically that you're already able to do manually or with a scraper?

[+] vidar|15 years ago|reply
He is pointing out the hipocrisy of FB, they say that this shouldn't be possible but they make it possible as long as it is on their terms.
[+] robchez|15 years ago|reply
Had to switch to classic mode in Yahoo mail and then turn on compatibility mode in IE9.

Worked great.

[+] johnnytee|15 years ago|reply
This did not work for me "0 contacts imported"
[+] raganwald|15 years ago|reply
I got the same thing with Safari and FF on OS X, then I remembered that I have blocked just about every backchannel between web pages and FB that I could find.

Are you using something like an AdBlocker script to block Facebook Connect or an extension like Facebook Disconnect? When I turned that stuff off, I was able to import a few hundred contacts...

[+] nailer|15 years ago|reply
I don't have a Facebook option to import from. I originally click a link entitled:

" An easy way to import your contacts Automatically bring family and friends into Yahoo! Mail, from Facebook and your old email accounts. Get your contacts now."

Then arriveat a page that doesn't have Facebook:

"Step 1 - Select Source

Importing contacts from your existing address books is easy. Just select the account(s) below where your contacts are stored. Default Accounts

    Another Yahoo! Account
    MSN
    Live.com
    Hotmail
    Gmail / Googlemail
    AOL
    A desktop email program (Outlook, AppleMail, etc...)
More Services

    Comcast
    EarthLink
    Laposte
    Verizon
    Web.de
    Orkut"
[+] DTrejo|15 years ago|reply
I tried it on linux and osx, and neither worked. I even verified by secondary email and it still didn't work.
[+] zzleeper|15 years ago|reply
Doesn't work in Chrome. Tried in FF and then it worked.
[+] kul|15 years ago|reply
Sweet, just exported 1002 contacts using safari on my iPad! This makes me irrationally happy.
[+] yatsyk|15 years ago|reply
I was unable to export contacts to yahoo with chromium and firefox ("0 new contacts imported" message) I'm registered with gmail email on facebook.

Would you share do you use gmail email in fb and is export successfull?

[+] AaronI|15 years ago|reply
Worked fine for me as well (using Chrome). I was able to get 591 out of 622 contacts, assuming those individuals changed their privacy settings to hide their email..
[+] bg4|15 years ago|reply
I just did this with Yahoo mail on Firefox. I just realized that it actually imported my wife's friend's emails since she was the one still logged into Facebook.
[+] vimalg2|15 years ago|reply
This worked for me on GNUlinux/Firefox 3.6

103 contacts imported.

I decided I wanted a backup, just in case <insert_screweduser_scenario_here_>

[+] drivebyacct2|15 years ago|reply
Facebook deletes your profile? Facebook up and disappears?
[+] akozak|15 years ago|reply
Why can't you use the API to get all of your friends' email addresses? I thought you could use an access token to query a friend for 'email'.
[+] guelo|15 years ago|reply
I haven't done Facebook API stuff for a while but it used to be that the emails it would give you were @facebook.com proxy addresses.
[+] simonsarris|15 years ago|reply
I'm not sure, but perhaps a combination of the following: They would rather you message them through facebook, and they fear fake-profiles friending people at random and collecting emails to be used for spam, were a query possible to collect them.
[+] eduardo_f|15 years ago|reply
Can't be done. At all. I've spent many hours trying.
[+] lzy|15 years ago|reply
Worked for me in Opera.
[+] pointillistic|15 years ago|reply
Didn't work with FF, Chrome or Safari on Windows XP. "0 Contacts Exported".