vCard MIME Type

What does text/vcard mean?

The text/vcard media type identifies vCard contact data. A vCard can describe a person, an organization, a group, or a place using fields for names, phone numbers, email addresses, postal addresses, photos, URLs, birthdays, notes, and other directory information. A single file can contain one or more cards.¹

IANA registers both .vcf and .vcard as filename extensions. .vcf is the extension most applications expose. The registration lists no magic number, so a trustworthy reader checks the structure and the VERSION property instead of relying on a fixed byte prefix.²

How is a vCard file structured?

vCard is a line-oriented format. Each card begins with BEGIN:VCARD, declares its version, contains property lines, and ends with END:VCARD. In vCard 4.0, FN supplies a formatted name and is required.¹

BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:4.0
FN:Alex Rivera
N:Rivera;Alex;;;
ORG:Example Studio
TITLE:Design Director
TEL;TYPE=work;VALUE=uri:tel:+1-555-0100
EMAIL;TYPE=work:[email protected]
URL:https://example.com
END:VCARD

A property can have parameters before the colon. In EMAIL;TYPE=work:[email protected], EMAIL is the property, TYPE=work describes it, and the text after the colon is the value. Common properties include:

vCard 4.0 uses UTF-8. Content lines should be folded at 75 octets, and a continued physical line begins with a space or tab. Readers remove the line break and that leading whitespace before interpreting the property. Escapes also matter: a literal comma, semicolon, backslash, or newline in a text value cannot always be copied as plain punctuation.¹

Which vCard version is in a .vcf file?

The MIME type does not select one vCard version. Inspect the VERSION line inside each card. IANA notes that older versions remain common and are similar but not strictly compatible.²

RFC 6350 replaced RFC 2426 and brought the media-type registration and the stand-alone file format into one specification. It also added properties such as KIND, GENDER, ANNIVERSARY, and CLIENTPIDMAP, removed several older constructs, and made UTF-8 the only permitted character set.¹³

Do not change only VERSION:3.0 to VERSION:4.0. Property value types, parameters, escaping, and allowed fields changed too. A real conversion must parse the source version and serialize a valid destination card.

How do you open a .vcf file?

Open a vCard with a contacts or address-book application when you want to add its entries. Apple Contacts and iCloud Contacts import and export vCards. Google Contacts imports .vcf files, and Microsoft Outlook can open a .vcf as a contact.⁴⁵⁶

Current web browsers do not provide a standard native vCard viewer. A .vcf link may download, open a registered contacts application, or be handled by a website. That behavior is different from the browser rendering text/vcard itself.

Before importing a large file, consider opening a copy in a trusted text editor or vCard validator. One .vcf can hold multiple contacts, so the number of address-book entries created may be greater than one. Apple documents that a multi-contact vCard imports each contact separately and exports selected contacts together in one file.⁴

Support in Poly

Poly can store and recognize text/vcard files. When the file is identified with that media type, it opens as readable source text, which is useful for checking names, numbers, addresses, and the declared vCard version without importing anything into an address book.

Support is source-oriented rather than contact-aware. Poly does not turn each card into an address-book entry, render a formatted contact card, or currently index vCard properties for full-text or semantic search. You can find the file by name, but a search for a phone number or organization that exists only inside the card will not match it. The Poly agent cannot currently read the card's contents directly.

Because .vcf has no magic number and is not inferred from its filename in every Poly client, preserve the text/vcard media type when transferring or uploading the file. If a vCard arrives as generic text or binary data, its preview and classification can differ.

Converting vCard to other formats

Choose a destination based on what will consume the data:

The IETF defines jCard in RFC 7095 and xCard in RFC 6351. Both preserve vCard semantics in another serialization.⁷⁸ A home-grown JSON object such as { "name": "Alex" } may be useful inside one application, but it is not jCard and cannot be assumed to round-trip all vCard properties.

For CSV conversion, decide how to represent repeated properties before exporting. One contact can have several email addresses, telephone numbers, URLs, and addresses, each with labels and preference information. Flattening those into one row without a documented mapping can silently discard data.

Privacy, security, and interoperability

A vCard can contain more than a public name and work number. It may include home addresses, birthdays, personal notes, geographic coordinates, photos, relationship details, identifiers, and URLs. RFC 6350 warns that vCards have no inherent authentication or confidentiality and recommends secure transport when authenticity or privacy matters.¹

Interoperability problems often come from version differences, bad line folding, incorrect escaping, unsupported vendor properties, or character encodings used by older 2.1 and 3.0 exporters. Keep the original file until the receiving application has preserved several representative contacts, especially entries with non-ASCII names, multiple phone numbers, photos, and labeled addresses.

Contact data also becomes stale. REV can record when a card was last revised, while SOURCE can point to an authoritative source, but neither guarantees that the information is current. Confirm sensitive or operational details with the person or organization rather than treating a successfully imported vCard as verified identity.