Import Hotmail Contacts

Question

I am trying to allow users to import their Hotmail contacts to my site to invite friends. I am looking to write a custom PHP solution, not something like http://openinviter.com/. I tried the Live API, but it only outputs email hashes.

Does anyone know how I can accomplish this? It was super easy to setup on Yahoo! and Gmail, but Hotmail has me floored. I need this to work on PHP 5.3.

Have you tried looking at this question http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2489622/import-hotmail-contacts-the-right-way? It has a lot of suggestions (also ones that support php) — Yet Another Geek, Jul 01 '11 at 14:33

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:27

I'm assuming you looked at this and it didn't help you at all?

EDIT: looking at Windows Live Messenger Connect Reference, Version 5.0 it appears that if you can navigate your way around their OAuth 2.0 implementation there is a fairly reasonable REST api for Contact access. Is this what you've been arguing with? There's a question at Retrieving user profile on messenger(windows live) connect sdk within php that discusses the sample code at http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/messengerconnect/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=4595. Given that you're offering a bounty I'll assume that you've already run this gauntlet, so I'll ask: have you gotten the OAuth to work at all, or are you still stuck there?

I have looked in to your update too. If you look closely on the REST Contacts page, you will see it only outputs email hashes used for matching, no actual email addresses. — ATLChris, Jul 01 '11 at 16:38

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 01 '11 at 14:31

0

From Microsoft's documentation: Finding People Who a User Knows on a Website

answered Jul 01 '11 at 14:31

Quentin

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That is not what I am looking for. I am trying to import a users contacts into my site. Not match them with people already on my site. – ATLChris Jul 01 '11 at 14:43

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 06 '11 at 01:44

I finally went with a work around / solution that requires the user to copy and past the "Print View" of their entire address book from Hotmail. Then I scrape the textarea input for email addresses using a regex statement.

While it is not ideal, it does work and my users don't seem to mind the copying and pasting since it is just one Copy/Paste for the entire address book. So far my users have imported 700 email addresses using this method and I have not received any bug reports or complaints about the work around I used.

Import Hotmail Contacts

3 Answers3