Facebook APIs don’t expose email addresses of users and hence none of the Facebook apps can provide you with the actual contact data of your friends. There’s however a simple (and perfectly legal) workaround that can help you easily download all your friends email addresses from Facebook’s walled garden.
Step One: Sign Up for (or Sign Into) Yahoo Mail Point your browser to Yahoo Mail
. If you have an account, you can sign in here. If not, click the Create New Account button and fill out the signup information.
Note: If you want a clean backup of your Facebook friends' email, I'd recommend creating a new account even if you already have a Yahoo Mail account.
Step Two: Import Your Facebook Friends' Email Addresses Now that you've signed up for (or signed into) your Yahoo Mail account, you're ready to import email from Facebook. It's really easy to do. If you just signed up, you should see a prompt to import contacts from Facebook, Gmail, Hotmail, and other sources. (If you already had a Yahoo Mail account, just click over to the Import Contacts tool
.) Click on Facebook, grant Yahoo access to your Facebook account, and then just wait as the contacts are exported from Facebook and imported to Yahoo.
Step Three: Export Your Facebook Email Addresses from Yahoo Once the import completes, you can export those email addresses in a number of formats. Again, back at the Yahoo Address Book
, just click on Tool -> Export (or just click here
), and click the Export Now button next to the export type you'd prefer
Bonus Step Four: Import the Facebook Email to Gmail Export the Yahoo! CSV from Yahoo. Gmail can likely handle a lot of different file types for contact import, but CSV is plain text and works like a charm.
Load Gmail Contacts
, then click on More actions -> Import, then upload the CSV file you downloaded from Yahoo. You can optionally add these contacts to a group (I called them Facebook Contacts).
Click Import and you're done.