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Go to your contact list, select the people you want to send to. Click on the word email on the right. Copy the addresses from the To field to the Bcc field and delete them from the To field. Write the email and send it. The daily sending limit is 500.

Going to have to be a major big apology since you have now exposed them to reams of junk mail. Never allow these sites to access your address book.

maybe I should just start a new thread, but my subject would be the same.... Facebook also just sent invites today to all my gmail contacts, and I definitely didn't give them permission to access my address book - in fact, I haven't even been ON facebook in 4 days! does anybody have any idea how this happened, and how I can prevent it happening in the future?

There is one answer to this and I'm afraid it is the only one. Until the day that Facebook and others like them can guarantee to stick by the rules that they offer don't use them. If you refuse to join they will lose the reason for ignoring them.

Thanks. But my point is that I don't recall EVER having given Facebook my gmail password (which is different from the password I use for Facebook) -- so with just my e-mail address, is it even possible that they could access my gmail contact list? Or must I have imported my contact list at some point (which I realize would have been a really stupid move on my part) and just forgotten?

Outside my field I'm afraid so you really need to go to a Facebook forum to find that out. I have always had doubts about these sites since my Spam count started going up the moment somebody invited me to join Facebook and has increased with every further invitation from wherever. I have one other Gmail account which has a minimum amount of spam but only one invitation was ever issued to it and two others that have never received any spam at all which I reserve for special tight friends.

Yeah, I'm with you there -- spam kinda seems inevitable with these sites :-/  Ah well, live and learn, I guess! Thanks for your input.

When you go to "Search for friends" or "Add friends" (whatever it's called) in Facebook, the system offers you to add your Gmail, Yahoo etc. contacts. And if you give your email address and the password there, all your contacts get the invite.

Facebook sent invites to my entire email address book as well, and I can say with certainty that I NEVER entered my email password on the "Find Friends" page. This is disturbing. I changed my passwords just in case.

The Facebook page that asks you for this info is very tricky, I almost fell for it the first time.

Where did Facebook get my GTalk contacts from?
I hate this!

Did google give it to them? doesn't that violate their privacy policies?

I will stop using gmail and google talk if that is the case.

PJ-sa,

Read my posts above. You gave the access to Facebook.

PJ-sa,

A friend invites you and that's it, they have your address and it's not only Facebook, it's all these chat sites and suchlike, somebody joins nad they say would you like us to search and see if anybody you know is a member. What they don't say is they are going to invite all the people in the address book.

Just joined facebook and noticed something interesting. I too chose NOT to scan gmail addresses etc and - with very little info on me apart from my name and schools - it started coming up with suggested contacts - 3 of which I recognised.
The link between then was Gmail invitations. Once was the bloke who invited me into gmail years ago, another was a friend I invited, and the third the girlfriend of a friend I invited.
It seems that facebook has access to the gmail invitation/referral tree.

From the FB group that henrydav2009 meantions:

Finally, to be 100% sure after you haev done the above, change the password on you mail account

Just found this thread as I've noticed facebook is able to access my gmail contacts - question posted here - http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=1a1b15fdb79a6de6&hl=en

I also went to the invite history mentioned above, and there are a load of invites sent out that I did not authorise, to people I have never heard of! - how embarrassing. I've always thought that by being careful what I allow a site like facebook to do/ have access to, that they would be playing fair and by some sort of rules. Looking like that's not the case, and they can pretty much get away with all sorts of underhanded (illegal?) tactics, with no way to contact them to complain.

Facebook should be governed by what it says when you join. They will check to see whether anybody in your Address Book is a member and not invite everybody. If some lawyer out ther would like to take them for a Class Action there are a load of people out there who would be entitled to compensation. It needs major publicity to stop users being caught like this and they should be forced into warning new members of what their Address Books will be used for on the sign up page in extremely large print.