Is there a webservice or API to help me read email contacts?

I am trying to add a feature in my website开发者_开发问答 to let the user invite his email contacts to visit the website, the same as twitter and facebook are doing.

I got bored from trying to implement this feature for each email service, for gmail, yahoo, msn. and when I success in implementing one another one change somethings in their APIs and i start to debug the problem.

By the way, is there an API or a webservice I can use which can give me this feature?

Found this API http://code.google.com/p/socialauth-net/ and seams good, will test it and write here later the result.

Context.IO allows you to extract the contacts directly from the email data, as long as the emails are accessible through IMAP

http://openinviter.com/ has those apis used its in PHP although you should be able to get some idea on how to call them from C# .

Here is a demo http://openinviter.com/demo/

This question is similar to:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2627722/free-api-for-friends-invite-from-gmail-yahoo-aol-hotmail-php-ajax

Sounds like the packages Gigya and Plaxo worked for that user.

http://channel9.msdn.com/events/MIX/MIX10/FT07

http://gxlive.wordpress.com/2011/09/29/getting-all-items-email-calendar-contacts-etc-from-microsoft-exchange-server-thru-c/

http://channel9.msdn.com/events/mix/mix11/FRM10

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2010/DEV323

http://sourceforge.net/projects/opencontactsnet/

http://sourceforge.net/project/downloading.php?group_id=210092&filesize=178426&filename=OpenContactsNet-1.0.zip

I think you can go through all of them find the right one for your email service.

There are no good open sources solutions to this problem. I have used the commercial products from this company and they work well:

http://stescodes.com/

You can see it in action on this site: http://www.gamzoo.com

The alternative is to research each individual email provider from which you would like to download contacts and implement somethign custom with each. The good news is that they are all starting to utilize OpenAuth for the authentication piece, but it's still a custom job for the most part.

I've used Janrain. It's rather expensive though, and you pay for many other features, not just address book access.

It's coverage is limited to the few most popular services, but I don't think you'll get anything better using OpenID.