Get contacts emails from Hotmail/Live

Question

I've been tearing my hair out for a while now about the best way to get import a users email contacts from a variety of different services, I didn't manage to find a decent .net solution and have ended up creating an interface for the open source PHP OpenInviter. However this doesn't work with Hotmail/windows live anymore, so I thought I'd do that myself with the Live Connect API (using REST and OAuth2), however the contacts only return a email_hashes which is no use as I want their actual email addresses, as I'm trying to import them into a new email address book.

Any ideas at all on how to do this or if it's possible at all! OAuth, screen scraping, whatever I'm not fussed I'd just like to get it done.

Thanks

Answer 1

Apparently there is no official solution to this problem (see http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/messengerconnect/thread/c5bc9b10-6080-40bf-a7ce-951a60efdfcb/#c5bc9b10-6080-40bf-a7ce-951a60efdfcb).

And according to the forums trying to do it is against terms and conditions (trying things like screen scraping).

Answer 2

I had this problem too. But then I found out that Google Plus is capable of pulling contacts from Hotmail accounts so I just looked at how Google Plus does it.

Just go the the "circles" page and look for the "inviter"-like functionality. There you find Hotmail, and if you look at how it works, you see that you need to add wl.emails and wl.contacts_emails to the scope when you request authorization from the Hotmail user.

As far as I can see you are already familiar with OAUTH and probably just picked wl.basic as the scope?..