I’m working on a Java application that needs to fetch contact information from Gmail accounts. I want to build functionality that can connect to Gmail and pull down the user’s contact list programmatically. What’s the best approach to accomplish this? I’ve been looking into different APIs but I’m not sure which one would work best for this specific task. Should I use the Gmail API or is there another method that would be more suitable? Any code examples or guidance on the authentication process would be really helpful since I’m new to working with Google’s services.
Google People API is your best bet here, not the Gmail API. I built something similar last year - OAuth2 setup was pretty straightforward once I figured it out. You’ll need to create credentials in Google Cloud Console and enable the People API. The tricky part? Getting refresh tokens right so users don’t have to keep reauthorizing. Make sure you request the right scopes like ‘https://www.googleapis.com/auth/contacts.readonly’ for read-only access. Google’s Java client libraries do most of the work once you’ve got auth sorted.
hey! i suggest using the people API, it’s way better for contacts than the Gmail API which is mainly for emails. i know OAuth2 seems tough but the docs from google are pretty helpful in guiding you through it.
Actually worked on this exact problem about 6 months ago for a CRM integration project. The People API is definitely the right choice, but there’s one gotcha nobody mentioned yet - rate limiting will bite you hard if you’re pulling large contact lists. Google’s quotas are strict and you’ll hit them fast with bulk operations. I ended up implementing exponential backoff and batch processing to handle this. Also, the contact data structure from the API can be inconsistent - some contacts have multiple phone numbers in different formats, others have incomplete email data. You’ll want robust parsing logic to handle these edge cases. The auth flow works well but store those refresh tokens securely since they’re long-lived.
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