How To Mass Export All Of Your Facebook Friends’ Private Email Addresses | Hacker News Reader

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

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199 pointssiddhant38 comments

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... ?

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

Maybe their emails are set as hidden..

Anybody know how to set this? I tried to figure it out yesterday but gave up after a minute or two.

EDIT: Account (top-right) > Privacy Settings, click Customize Settings (lower middle, small text), then very last setting is your e-mail address visibility.

Change your gmail address with your new yahoo email on facebook and it will work.

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?

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.

It's just Arrington being an asshat, you've been able to do this since... forever. In fact I saw this exact guide (using Yahoo) 3 days ago on another site, pretty sure this is Mike recycling someone else's content.

March 2010: http://www.labnol.org/internet/export-email-addresses-from-f...

Had to switch to classic mode in Yahoo mail and then turn on compatibility mode in IE9.

Worked great.

This did not work for me "0 contacts imported"

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...

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"

1. Change to the classic interface. The button for this is in the "options" drop down in the upper left under the yellow web search button.

2. Click on the "Contacts" tab.

3. Select the "tools" dropdown from the royal blue menu bar.

4. Choose "Import...."

5. You should see clickable logos for facebook, gmail and hotmail.

ALSO:

It worked for me with firefox 3.6.9 on ubuntu. It didn't work for me with 3.6.9 on CentOS. It appears to be very fragile.

Thanks, that worked.

Step 1 should be upper right, not upper left.

I tried it on linux and osx, and neither worked. I even verified by secondary email and it still didn't work.

Doesn't work in Chrome. Tried in FF and then it worked.

I just tried it an it worked fine for me in Chrome (OS X). I had changed my Yahoo settings to Yahoo Asia a while back so I could enable POP, and when I created the new email address it defaulted to Yahoo Asia.

Not sure if this played a part but I now have all my friend's email addresses in a CSV file on my local HD...

Worked fine for me in Chrome on Ubuntu 10.10.

It took two tries, however. The first time, it imported 0 contacts. I tried it again less than five minutes later, using the same account, process, and browser. Worked fine.

Doesn't work for me in FF. shrug

Sweet, just exported 1002 contacts using safari on my iPad! This makes me irrationally happy.

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?

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..

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.

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'.

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.

It depends on their privacy settings if you can get to it or not through the api. Your app can request explicit extended permission for it. http://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/permissio...

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.

Can't be done. At all. I've spent many hours trying.

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_>

Facebook deletes your profile? Facebook up and disappears?

Be creative! How about Facebook only exports proxied @facebook.com email addresses?

Oh god...

Worked for me in Opera.

Didn't work with FF, Chrome or Safari on Windows XP. "0 Contacts Exported".

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