June 18, 2011 at 02:22How to add friends to Facebook by their email address
I did a little research on this and would like to share its results. Perhaps someone will be useful.
The question arose before me: how can I find a person on Facebook if I only have his e-mail. The banal answer “ask him himself” is obviously not accepted, because in 99 percent of cases it is recommended to find by name and surname. Facebook has a hard time with this, especially for the widespread Ivanovs and Petrovs :)
As a result, small “dances with a tambourine” are required.
So, the source of your friend’s e-mail can be the address book of your mail client or e-mail from a business card. Consider both options. More precisely, suppose that you need to select friends first from an existing address book, and also learn how to add friends individually later, by their known e-mail, for example, from a business card.
If you corresponded with a friend at least once, then modern mail services automatically put his e-mail in your address book. As a result, after some time, your address book accumulates people who deserve an invitation to Facebook, and this import can be automated.
In my case, the mail service was Google Mail. I decided to try importing contacts from him into Facebook, and also create a separate account where I would add contacts from business cards and then start importing from Facebook from them. This know-how would make it possible to search for people on Facebook by e-mail, which he “officially” does not know how to do.
As you know, Facebook is not friends with Google and one of the “fi” is Facebook’s refusal to import contacts from Google mail. When you try to enter an e-mail in the gmail domain in the “Your email address” field , Facebook immediately displays the message “We can't import contacts from this address yet” (at least that was at the time of writing the article and months earlier and definitely worked about a year ago).
It would seem that there is always a “fallback option”, export contacts from Google mail to a file, and feed the file to Facebook. Whatever the case, Facebook hangs on all three possible export formats (as of the day this article was written). It was tested on two browsers under Mac OS and in IE8 under Windows.
The next thing that comes to mind is to create a mailbox on some other service, find contacts there, import a file with contacts from Google there, or, if that service is able to, give it direct access to Google mail for self-importing contacts.
Note that Facebook “knows” about more email services than are presented on the Find Friends page . But let's start with those that are allocated there in separate blocks:
1. Yandex.Mail. Make a box pretty quickly, there are convenient contacts, BUT! no import. Moreover, Yandex’s help indicates that there is import: “ On the web interface address book page, click on the“ Import ”button . There is no such button, I suspect that“ it is already gone. ”
2. Yahoo.Mail . Technically, there is import, direct from Gmail, but in my case I couldn’t handle it. It gives an error, and it does not depend on the size of the imported data.
3. Mail.ru. Facebook recognized the mail, imports the contacts, but here's an ambush: in mail.ru there is a limit on the number of contacts - 1000. Also, mail.ru does not know how to pump contacts from Google on its own. If these restrictions do not interfere, then a usable fuller.
4. Rambler.Pochta. Here, the import of contacts was not found at all.
5. Hotmail . This mail service worked with a bang. He has a full-fledged and fairly fast importer of Gmail and files, and it works as it should. The import of nearly 2000 contacts from Gmail went off with a bang. Only one e-mail is enough to add a new contact.
So, the result is as follows: Hotmail was the most suitable for our needs. If you have less than 1000 contacts, then Mail.ru is also suitable.
What do we do next. We create two mailboxes - one for storing contacts with Google, the other for new contacts. After importing contacts and “feeding” them to Facebook, the first box will be completely unnecessary, you can delete it immediately after. Why can’t I use one box for these purposes? Because to import contacts one at a time, you need an empty address book, and fellow developers of all the above mail services, including the Hotmail that we have chosen, do not implement the mass removal of ALL contacts, and delete them after the mass import page by page for a very long time. It’s easier to remove a box.
So, in the first box we transfer contacts from Gmail by import using the appropriate Hotmail tool (its service itself will actively offer after registration). Then we go to Facebook on the page Find Friendsand checkmark friends. Let me remind you that Facebook displays a list of friends whose e-mails were found in the address book of the specified mail service and at the same time whose e-mails are listed in the Facebook profile.
Next, every time you need to find someone by e-mail, do the following. We go into our box specially created for these purposes with the name, for example, for.new.contacts@hotmail.com and add an entry to the address book there. All fields are optional except an e-mail, and we have it. After that, we go to the page for importing Facebook contacts and there we enter the above address into the "email address" field. Facebook finds the person on the specified e-mail, as required.
If you add the form of adding a new contact and the import page to Facebook to your browser’s bookmarks, then searching for a person by e-mail turns into a simple two-step procedure and takes only a few seconds.
The question arose before me: how can I find a person on Facebook if I only have his e-mail. The banal answer “ask him himself” is obviously not accepted, because in 99 percent of cases it is recommended to find by name and surname. Facebook has a hard time with this, especially for the widespread Ivanovs and Petrovs :)
As a result, small “dances with a tambourine” are required.
So, the source of your friend’s e-mail can be the address book of your mail client or e-mail from a business card. Consider both options. More precisely, suppose that you need to select friends first from an existing address book, and also learn how to add friends individually later, by their known e-mail, for example, from a business card.
If you corresponded with a friend at least once, then modern mail services automatically put his e-mail in your address book. As a result, after some time, your address book accumulates people who deserve an invitation to Facebook, and this import can be automated.
In my case, the mail service was Google Mail. I decided to try importing contacts from him into Facebook, and also create a separate account where I would add contacts from business cards and then start importing from Facebook from them. This know-how would make it possible to search for people on Facebook by e-mail, which he “officially” does not know how to do.
As you know, Facebook is not friends with Google and one of the “fi” is Facebook’s refusal to import contacts from Google mail. When you try to enter an e-mail in the gmail domain in the “Your email address” field , Facebook immediately displays the message “We can't import contacts from this address yet” (at least that was at the time of writing the article and months earlier and definitely worked about a year ago).
It would seem that there is always a “fallback option”, export contacts from Google mail to a file, and feed the file to Facebook. Whatever the case, Facebook hangs on all three possible export formats (as of the day this article was written). It was tested on two browsers under Mac OS and in IE8 under Windows.
The next thing that comes to mind is to create a mailbox on some other service, find contacts there, import a file with contacts from Google there, or, if that service is able to, give it direct access to Google mail for self-importing contacts.
Note that Facebook “knows” about more email services than are presented on the Find Friends page . But let's start with those that are allocated there in separate blocks:
1. Yandex.Mail. Make a box pretty quickly, there are convenient contacts, BUT! no import. Moreover, Yandex’s help indicates that there is import: “ On the web interface address book page, click on the“ Import ”button . There is no such button, I suspect that“ it is already gone. ”
2. Yahoo.Mail . Technically, there is import, direct from Gmail, but in my case I couldn’t handle it. It gives an error, and it does not depend on the size of the imported data.
3. Mail.ru. Facebook recognized the mail, imports the contacts, but here's an ambush: in mail.ru there is a limit on the number of contacts - 1000. Also, mail.ru does not know how to pump contacts from Google on its own. If these restrictions do not interfere, then a usable fuller.
4. Rambler.Pochta. Here, the import of contacts was not found at all.
5. Hotmail . This mail service worked with a bang. He has a full-fledged and fairly fast importer of Gmail and files, and it works as it should. The import of nearly 2000 contacts from Gmail went off with a bang. Only one e-mail is enough to add a new contact.
So, the result is as follows: Hotmail was the most suitable for our needs. If you have less than 1000 contacts, then Mail.ru is also suitable.
What do we do next. We create two mailboxes - one for storing contacts with Google, the other for new contacts. After importing contacts and “feeding” them to Facebook, the first box will be completely unnecessary, you can delete it immediately after. Why can’t I use one box for these purposes? Because to import contacts one at a time, you need an empty address book, and fellow developers of all the above mail services, including the Hotmail that we have chosen, do not implement the mass removal of ALL contacts, and delete them after the mass import page by page for a very long time. It’s easier to remove a box.
So, in the first box we transfer contacts from Gmail by import using the appropriate Hotmail tool (its service itself will actively offer after registration). Then we go to Facebook on the page Find Friendsand checkmark friends. Let me remind you that Facebook displays a list of friends whose e-mails were found in the address book of the specified mail service and at the same time whose e-mails are listed in the Facebook profile.
Next, every time you need to find someone by e-mail, do the following. We go into our box specially created for these purposes with the name, for example, for.new.contacts@hotmail.com and add an entry to the address book there. All fields are optional except an e-mail, and we have it. After that, we go to the page for importing Facebook contacts and there we enter the above address into the "email address" field. Facebook finds the person on the specified e-mail, as required.
If you add the form of adding a new contact and the import page to Facebook to your browser’s bookmarks, then searching for a person by e-mail turns into a simple two-step procedure and takes only a few seconds.