Gmail/Hotmail Importer

Hi all,

I know you’ve all probably seen sites that allow you to sign up for an account simply by typing in your gmail, hotmail or yahoo account information. Some sites even do you a favor and searches for users on the site that are also on your contact lists in each respective email client. Facebook, for example, lets you do this. There are several other sites as well, but I can’t recall them right now.

My question is, how is this accomplished? Is there an API offered by each client or are these custom-developed? If so, where might I find the information for the API, or information on how to go about developing something like this in PHP?

Thanks!

Also in #PHP _↴