Extracting emails from Gmail and Google Apps for Domains

jvallery — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 22:09:52 +0000

First off, I’ll get the link out of the way. If you go to http://vallery.net/gmail/ you can see this application in action. Now a little bit more about it.

I discovered that over the years I haven’t exactly been great about maintaining my addressbook. I’ve lost touch of many of acquaintances that I have had casual communication with. I realized that their email addresses where trapped in the deep bowels of my Gmail account, if only there was some way to extract them. I quickly realized that using the newly released IMAP protocol I could probe every message and then extract out the email addresses from it, and in some cases even additional data like the first and last name. I started playing around with the scripting a bit and came up with what I have now. This tool goes out to the Gmail IMAP server and downloads the message header from ever email that is stored in my Gmail account (except the SPAM folder). It pulls them into a master list, along with the first and last name if available. After all of the emails have been extracted it calculates some basic statistics including frequency of occurrence, which it users to sort them on. All of this information is then exported into CSV files that are compatible with many different applications.

While doing this I discovered an additional use for this data. On many of the social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn they will allow you to import a contact list file and find everyone that has registered for the service that you already know. This turned out to be a really killer app for this functionality. The only challenge was that they limit your ability to upload contacts to about 2,000 at one go. I added some additional functionality to my extract that “chunked” the file into several files, each with 2,000 email addresses in it. This allowed me to upload my newly discovered contacts a bit at a time, which worked very well.

If you would like to extract the email addresses from your Gmail or Google Apps for Domains account head over to http://vallery.net/gmail/ and give it a whirl!

Debug your outbound POST and GET requests

jvallery — Thu, 17 May 2007 19:27:13 +0000

I work a lot with different types of web services. I find when I’m building an application that has to post data off to a remote service that it can be difficult to debug where the problems are. I can’t always see an exact copy of the HTTP request that I am sending, and therefore how the remote service sees my call. I created a simple little app that when called will return exactly what it was sent. You can pass in variables in a POST or GET, and it will just spit them right back at you along with whatever HTTP headers were sent by your client.

If you point your browser over to http://vallery.net/postback/index.php you can see it in action. It will report back to you exactly how your browser is identifying itself, including any cookies you might have received from my word press blog!

Now the next time you are writing an application and you want to debug your outbound posts, just send them over to the above URL and it will respond with exactly what it received.

Pretty cool!

Vallery.net » php

Extracting emails from Gmail and Google Apps for Domains

Debug your outbound POST and GET requests