How do I check an email list for FB accounts?

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bobbydigital

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So I am creating a script to clean my mailing lists. And i thought it would be great to seperate out the ones with FB accounts.

I hired a dev who said they could do it but now they say it is impossible.

We are tlaking about big lsits here 100k+ and it needs to be done reasonably fast (1 hour is barely acceptable for 100k).

Any suggestions on how I would go about doing this?

I am looking for a direction my dev can run in so any help at all would be much appreciated!

thanks
 
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Are you saying 1 hour is too much or too little time for 100k?
 
Just thought Id mention to you that since reading this post, I remembered that I scraped just under 35K emails from G a while back and decided to do this. I have made a script recently that scrapes Facebook IDs and profile info and after a little bit of modifications to the script, I am able to connect to my database of emails and to see if that email has an account on Facebook or not, if it has, it then stores their name and profile link in the database along with the email.

So it isn't impossible :)
 
ericsson: Im not sure I quite understand your questions. Basically I am trying to figure out a way to clean up the data I buy as best possible. I use various scrubbing services but my thinking was if I can check against FB then I can at least identify a subset of email addresses that must be valid. That subset will have significantly fewer bounces (hopefully) and if the percentages are high enough I may not even need to deal with the non-FB verified data.

chronic: I am saying 1 hour would be waaaaay too slow to verify 100k records. whatever solution I implement needs to be fast. I mentioned the speed because as I understand it FB has some rate limiting in place for certain requests.

As for your script: that sound cool. I guess the challenge is to continually scrape FB for new user IDs to keep your local DB up to date. I have no experience with scraping scripts. On a 1-10 difficulty scale how hard is this type of thing to execute?

I was hoping there was a way to directly use FB's API to accomplish this, but i guess that is not the case.

Thanks for your feedback!

If anybody else has other ideas I am all ears!
 
IMO, I would say 1 hour to check 100,000 emails against accounts through FB's server is way to much load on their server at once. That would be making 1,666 requests per minute and a quick turnaround is not always good when you want to play it safe.

As for the scraper, so far I have made an ID scraper, profile information and photo scraper and now the email checker. I have been using mostly PHP, Javascript and now a little MySQL. The way I have been doing is pretty basic and once you get your head around it, it isn't hard to set up in your browser using a plugin.

I have only been working on this script for little over a week now and barely knew Javascript before then but confident on PHP and thinking outside of the box *cough* iframes to access FB *cough*.. So that is how easy I have found it. I am now looking into VB and hoping to rewrite my scripts into a more powerful language and run them all within one tool and perhaps if it goes successful then I will be releasing it to BHW 8)

EDIT: Forgot to mention, I have also adapted it to gather all the IDs of people who like a specific page too.. That way once all the fans have been gathered from that niche, I can either attempt to post on their walls (the onces who are open), try to collect emails or my most likely option to add as many as I can to accounts.
 
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Yes, there is a way to validate e-mails against Facebook's database. It would require captcha and with enough proxies (read: a few thousand) you could probably pull it off... but 100k checks in 1 hour is a good rate for a method of virtually ensuring an e-mail is authentic and in use. You gotta weigh the pros and cons of the situation. You either achieve your goal slowly, or you don't achieve it at all..
 
From what I am seeing no captchas are needed just a valid account :)
 
Yes, this is really simple to do..

- log into a valid FB account
- use FB's search function and the email as the term

This will either come up with a profile linked to that email or not. From here all you got to do is automate this process, check whether a profile is found and then load a new email as the search term.

Crazy. said:
You're able to take any e-mail and verify it as being a FB account, w/o captcha?
Click to expand...
 
Thanks for the feedback everybody!

Crazy. - Ok I would be willing to accept a slower rate. Can you fill me in on how this could be accomplished? Or at least give me enough direction to get my dev on the right track?

chronic - thanks for continuing to make suggestions but I think the search box verification method is very speed limited by FB. Any other ideas?

Also jsut to be clear I am looking to add this functionality on a server side script not a desktop app/plugin.
 
The method I am currently using is about 70/30 server script and browser plugin but could all be done on the server. As for the search function, there isnt any speed restrictions as such because I use the h**p:// m . Facebook side of the site so page load is very fast. As for not using the search function to do this, I would say it is impossible to do it any other way without connecting to their database.
 
do you guys know a free service or script i can use to clean a list of emails 100k list ?
 
kingfish_x said:
do you guys know a free service or script i can use to clean a list of emails 100k list ?
Click to expand...

As far as I know, there definitely isn't any free service for this as it would be widely known and suggested already but there may be a few ready made knocking about or you could learn to make your own ;)
 
@chronic - Thanks for that post. Honestly, I didn't know that was a viable option because when you mentioned it was possible to search w/o captcha, that's the first thing that came to mind. When I tested it, it didn't yield a positive result. I searched for a friends e-mail. I could have it wrong, but if not does this method produce false negatives? By that I mean, is it limited by the user's privacy settings?

@bobbydigital - The method I suggested is quite obvious and isn't limited by privacy controls and can be used for almost every service. However, it very well could have tighter restrictions than chronic's method. I'd rather not post it here as it can be adjusted within a few key strokes so please PM me if you want it so you can move forward.
 
I made a basic checker a while back in ubot, not sure if it will do it as fast as you want it to but feel free to try:

Code: 
http://botstore.custombot.net/FBChecker.zip
 
Here you go man.. this one is really fast, set how many threads you want :D

Code: 
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/member-downloads/280637-get-facebook-email-lookup-2-0-a.html
 
Thanks for all the feedback everybody!

July23: Awesome thanks for the link! THe only issue is it is a windows based app and I am looking to do this in a server side script. Dfe a great palce to start though! Thanks a ton!

Fatboy: Thanks a ton as well for providing this link! Unfortunatly I dont ahve ubot and it is client side as well so not exactly what I am looking for but I really appretiate you putting it up! Care to comment on the process this goes through to check FB for the email?

Crazy: I actually don't have PM abilities yet (I am a long time lurker infrequent poster) Would you mind PMing me the info? Much appreitated!

Chronic: thanks for the tip on the mobile side of things that makes tons of sense! Can you elaborate a little more on what the script would need to do server side?

Thanks again everybody for all your help!
 
fatboy said:
I made a basic checker a while back in ubot, not sure if it will do it as fast as you want it to but feel free to try:

Code: 
http://botstore.custombot.net/FBChecker.zip
Click to expand...

It don't startup.. Do i need anything else?
 
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