Find Facebook user url to profile page by known email address

Question

I have an email address and want to find out if there is a Facebook user linked to this address  If there is  then I want to retrieve the url to this users profile page and save it somewhere  I do not have a facebook application  but  if necessary  I would use existing account data to login to facebook and perform the task   I thought this would be an easy task  but somehow it s not  I read through the Graph API documentation and there you find instructions on how to search public data  It says the format is  https   graph facebook com search q QUERY amp type OBJECT TYPE  But trying this with an email address in the q param and user in the type param without further information results in an OAuthException saying  An access token is required to request this resource   However  if you click the example search links Facebook generates a url with the mentioned access token related to the currently logged on user  Performing searches with this token gives the expected results  But i cannot figure out how to get this user session access token after logging in  Every time I search on how to get an access token I only find information regarding Facebook apps and retrieving permissions for basic or specific data access  This is  as I mentioned  not what I am looking for  as I don t have and don t need a facebook app   Since Facebook gives me the needed token in the example links I thought it shouldn t be a problem to get it too  Or do they only have it because of home advantage  Also  the Outlook Social Connector Provider for Facebook is able to retrieve Facebook data just via an email address  and the account data provided   So I thought  if Microsoft can do this stuff I should be also possible to do simliar things   Last but not least this is the more frustrating since I  theoretically and practically  am already able to find users profile url just by searching for the email address  I don t even have to be logged on to Facebook  And it s not the official API way  If I perform a web request to http   www facebook com search php init s email amp q example domain com amp type users I get the expected search result  The problem is that I have to parse the HTML code and extract the url  that s okay  and that the result page is possibly subject to change and could easily break my method to extract the url  problematic    So does anybody has an idea what s the best way to accomplish the given task

User · Answer

Simply use the graph API with this url format: https://graph.facebook.com/[email protected]&type=user&access_token=... You can easily create an application here and grab an access token for it here. I believe you get an estimated 600 requests per 600 seconds, although this isn't documented.

If you are doing this in bulk, you could use batch requests in batches of 20 email addresses. This may help with rate limits (I am not sure if you get 600 batch requests per 600 seconds or 600 individual requests).

User · Answer

Maybe things changed  but I recall rapleaf had a service where you enter an email address and you could receive a facebook id  https   www rapleaf com     If something was not in there  one could  sign up  with the email  and it should have a chance to get the data after a while   I came across this when using a search tool called Maltego a few years back  The app uses many types of  transforms   and a few where related to facebook and twitter etc      or find some new sqli s on fb and fb apps  hehe

User · Answer

The definitive answer to this is from Facebook themselves   In post today at https   developers facebook com bugs 335452696581712 a Facebook dev says  The ability to pass in an e-mail address into the  user  search type was removed on July 10  2013  This search type only returns results that match a user s name  including alternate name     So  alas  the simple answer is you can no longer search for users by their email address   This sucks  but that s Facebook s new rules

User · Answer

Facebook has a strict policy on sharing only the content which a profile makes public to the end user   Still what you want is possible if the user has actually left the email id open to public domain   A wild try u can do is send batch requests for the maximum possible batch size to ids    http   graph facebook com     and parse the result to check if email exists and if it does then it matches to the one you want   you don t need any access token for the public information     in case you want email id of a FB user only possible way is that they authorize ur app and then you can use the access token thus generated for the required task

User · Answer

I ve captured the communication of Outlook plugin for Facebook and here is the POST request  https   api facebook com method fql multiquery access token TOKEN amp queries   USER0   select  0   uid  name  birthday date  profile url  pic  website from user where uid in  select uid from email where email in   EMAIL HASH      PENDING OUT   select uid to from friend request where uid from   MY ID and  uid to IN  select uid from  USER0       where TOKEN - valid access token EMAIL HASH - combination of CRC32 and MD5 hash of searched email address in format crc32 md5 MY ID - ID of facebook profile of access token owner  But when I run this query with different access token  generated for my own application  the server response is   The table you requested does not exist  I also haven t found the table email in Facebook API documentation  Does Microsoft have some extra rights at Facebook

User · Answer

This is appeared as pretty easy task  as Facebook don t hiding user emails or phones from me  So here is html parsing function on PHP with cURL         Search Facebook without authorization     Query         user name  e-mail  phone  page etc     Types of search         all  people  pages  places  groups  apps  events     Result         Array with facebook page names   facebook com  page        By      57ar7up     Date    2016    function facebook search  query   type    all         url    http   www facebook com search    type    q    query       user agent    Mozilla 5 0  Windows NT 6 1  WOW64  AppleWebKit 537 36  KHTML  like Gecko  Chrome 48 0 2564 109 Safari 537 36         c   curl init        curl setopt array  c  array          CURLOPT URL               gt   url          CURLOPT USERAGENT         gt   user agent          CURLOPT RETURNTRANSFER    gt  TRUE          CURLOPT FOLLOWLOCATION    gt  TRUE          CURLOPT SSL VERIFYPEER    gt  FALSE              data   curl exec  c        preg match all   href   https     www facebook com              people            d               data   matches       if  matches 3  0     FALSE                     facebook com people name id          pages   array map function  el               return explode       el  0               matches 3          else                                         facebook com name          pages    matches 2       return array filter array unique  pages        Removing duplicates and empty values

User · Answer

First I thank you    57ar7up and I will add the following code it helps in finding the return phone number   function index            keyword    0946664869        sql    SELECT   FROM phone find LIMIT 10        result     this- gt GlobalMD- gt query global  sql        fb   array        foreach  result as  value            keyword    value  phone             fb      this- gt facebook search  keyword             var dump  fb       function facebook search  query   type    all         url    http   www facebook com search    type    q    query       user agent    this- gt loaduserAgent          c   curl init        curl setopt array  c  array          CURLOPT URL               gt   url          CURLOPT USERAGENT         gt   user agent          CURLOPT RETURNTRANSFER    gt  TRUE          CURLOPT FOLLOWLOCATION    gt  TRUE          CURLOPT SSL VERIFYPEER    gt  FALSE              data   curl exec  c       preg match     amp  123  amp quot id amp quot    P lt fbUserId gt  d         data   matches       if isset  matches  fbUserId     amp  amp   matches  fbUserId                    fbUserId    matches  fbUserId             params   array  query  fbUserId        else           fbUserId                params   array  query  fbUserId             return  params

User · Answer

Maybe this is a little bit late but I found a web site which gives social media account details by know email addreess  It is https   www fullcontact com   You can use Person Api there and get the info   This is a type of get   https   api fullcontact com v2 person xml email someone      amp apiKey           Also there is xml or json choice

User · Answer

Andreas  I ve also been looking for an  email-to-id  ellegant solution and couldn t find one  However  as you said  screen scraping is not such a bad idea in this case  because emails are unique and you either get a single match or none  As long as Facebook don t change their search page drastically  the following will do the trick   final static String USER SEARCH QUERY    http   www facebook com search php init s email amp q  s amp type users   final static String USER URL PREFIX    http   www facebook com profile php id     public static String emailToID String email        try               String html   getHTML String format USER SEARCH QUERY  email            if  html    null                        int i   html indexOf USER URL PREFIX    USER URL PREFIX length                if  i  gt  0                                StringBuilder sb   new StringBuilder                    char c                  while  Character isDigit c   html charAt i                          sb append c                   if  sb length    gt  0                      return sb toString                                  catch  Exception e                e printStackTrace              return null     private static String getHTML String htmlUrl  throws MalformedURLException  IOException       StringBuilder response   new StringBuilder        URL url   new URL htmlUrl       HttpURLConnection httpConn    HttpURLConnection  url openConnection        httpConn setRequestMethod  GET        if  httpConn getResponseCode      HttpURLConnection HTTP OK                BufferedReader input   new BufferedReader new InputStreamReader httpConn getInputStream     8192           String strLine   null          while   strLine   input readLine       null              response append strLine           input close              return  response length      0    null   response toString

User · Answer

WARNING  Old and outdated answer  Do not use    I think that you will have to go for your last solution  scraping the result page of the search  because you can only search by email with the API into those users that have authorized your APP  and you will need one because the token that FB provides in the examples has an expiry date and you need extended permissions to access the user s email    The only approach that I have not tried  but I think it s limited in the same way  is FQL  Something like  SELECT   FROM user WHERE email  your email com

User · Answer

In response to the bug filed here  http   developers facebook com bugs 167188686695750 a Facebook engineer replied      This is by design  searching for users is intended to be a user to user function only  for use in finding new friends or searching by email to find existing contacts on Facebook  The  scraping  mentioned on StackOverflow is specifically against our Terms of Service https   www facebook com terms php and in fact the only legitimate way to search for users on Facebook is when you are a user

[facebook] Find Facebook user (url to profile page) by known email address

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