Hacking Gmail

182 Part III — Conquering Gmail

Here is an example of a very simple vCard file:

BEGIN:VCARD

VERSION:3.0

FN:Ben Hammersley

EMAIL;type=INTERNET:[email protected]

END:VCARD

Saving that to disk and importing it into a vCard-compatible program will result

in my lovely e-mail address being embedded into your system. vCard files can

contain more than one vCard within, and that’s what the script in Listing 12-3

does. It’s very, very simple. It opens up a filehandle to a file called contacts.vcf

in the directory you’re running the script in (change that line to make it go else-

where, naturally), and then calls upon the Mail::Webmail::Gmail module to

provide a hash of the contacts in your Contacts list. It then just iterates through

them, creating vCards as it goes and printing them to the filehandle. Then it

closes the filehandle and exits. Simplicity itself, really. You can then go on and

import the large vCard file into your weapon of choice.

And Now

In this chapter, you looked at dealing with contacts within Gmail. You should

have learned how to import contacts from other applications. You should also be

able to export them at will, in order to re-import them into other applications or

for backup purposes. In the next chapter, you look at scraping the Gmail interface.