Email Recommendation

arbitrage

I am in the process of finalising what I require from my website before giving an outline to my designer.

One aspect I am interested in adding is one where visitors to my website can input their email address and password for their email accounts and a recommendation email is sent to people in their contacts.

I see this is an option on the groupon signup page. Is this difficult to implement into a website and how does it work with the persons email account?

FSL

Why would anyone be fool enough to enter their email address and password so that all their contacts can be spammed

It might say they don't save your password but doesn't mention anything about not saving your contacts.

aidan_walsh

Never ever ever* ask for a password for a third party service.


*Some very limited exceptions apply

The Corinthian

arbitrage wrote: »

Is this difficult to implement into a website and how does it work with the persons email account?

Yes it would be difficult, unless you have access to an API to their Web account for returning contact details - and naturally Gmail, Yahoo, etc all would have different API's. If not, you're in the magical world of screen scraping, which will likely be quite complex and require ongoing upkeep.

So, it can be done, but will cost a lot in terms of resources and, by extension, money. In return, I'd be surprised if even 5% of your sign ups are dumb enough to give away their login details and use it.

Then again, maybe that's your market.

stevenmu

It's possible to do this without requiring a user's password using Oauth. I believe this currently works for the major services like Windows Live/Hotmail, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter etc.

Conceptually the way it works is that you would have a number of buttons on your site for each service that you want to be able to pull contact data from (or you could determine this automatically from their email address). When the user clicks on it they are directed to a login page hosted by the service themselves, and this is where they enter their credentials, so your website never sees them. If they choose to allow your site to access their contact details, the service will then issue your site with a token. Your site can then use the token to authenticate to their API and access the contact details on the users behalf.

It's clean and effective, you never store the user's credentials, and you don't get access to anything more than what you have asked the user for.

From a more ethical perspective, you should think carefully about doing this. If I were to get an email from some website because someone I know gave away their contacts, not only would I be very unhappy with that website and make a point of avoiding it, I would also make sure that the person who signed me up would also be very unhappy with that site.

There's also serious legal/data protection issues around sending email to and the storing of email addresses, particularly for people who have not signed up to your website.

Socialist_Pig

so you want somebody to give you access to their email account,by providing their password,so you can spam their contacts??

and thats to save them the hassle of typing or copy/pasting there friends email addresses into the 2nd field?:rolleyes:

The Corinthian

OK. I think the OP gets it that the idea is not one that gets broad support from the rest of us. Let it go.

I think that what his company/client needs to do is consider the cost of development, maintenance and other consequences of such functionality versus the perceived benefits.

Personally I don't think those numbers crunch towards implementation and get the impression that this was the brainchild of an inexperienced marketing monkey.

sirreally

Your developer can use a third party service like Plaxo.com for this. Bear in mind that the importing of email addresses should be just the first step in the process. Following this, the user should be presented with the list of adresses, and can then choose exactly who to invite. Naturally, there needs to be a very compelling reason for someone to bother inviting anyone, otherwise it will be ignored. In the case of Groupon, there is both a financial incentive and a genuine "hey, check out this deal" angle (the second one is more crucial to have).

Also, just an observation: perhaps you should consider using words like "please" and "thanks" in your posts requesting information and advice from people.