Why vcard doesn't arrive in gmail?

Question

Someone send me a vcard using outlook. But it doesn't arrive in my gmail.

Instead appears this text

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Someone" <someone@somewhere.com>
To: 
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2008 07:37:51 -0700
Subject: Someone2

This same e-mail was sent to another person using outlook and the vcards arrived ok.

Answer 1

Gmail just doesn't support it by the look of things, it's an old standard now, and I too was sure I'd seen vcards coming as attachments - but I think that must have been in Apple Mail.

If a user wants to send a vcard to a Gmail contact they could export it, convert it and send in CSV format which can then be imported into Gmail.

1 open address book 2 select contact you need and drag it to the desktop 3 this will create a v-card for that contact 4 use http://labs.brotherli.ch/vcfconvert/ to convert it to gmail csv format.

How are they sending the vcard? From a mobile? From a desktop PC? Is it automatically appended to the bottom of the mail? I think Gmail just ignores them by default.

Answer 2

I started this as a comment to kpoehls's answer but the formatting was getting too weird so, FWIW...

I, too, receive vcards as attachments in Gmail.

The ones I receive are .vcf files and the MIME header is, for example:

Content-Type: text/x-vcard; charset=utf-8
Content-Disposition: attachment;
    filename="xxxxxxx.vcf"

begin:vcard

So Gmail is capable of handling these if they arrive in a format that it recognizes.

I know Google did not use to support vcard import into the contacts list (e.g. see http://groups.google.com/group/Gmail-Past-discussions/browse_thread/thread/282b44fb77b7bd4a/e36c7e42a1fd49bc) and, although subsequent to this, there was discussion of hcard and vcard microformat support more directly (e.g. http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/08/google-maps-adds-support-for-hcard.html), as far as I can see this behaviour, of receiving the vcard as an attachment but not being able to import it into the contacts list, is still the norm (e.g. http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=5dfe5806e1d55063&hl=en).

None of this answers why you didn't receive the vcard as an attachment but it may be worth checking the actual received message (from the 'show original' option) to see if the data has just been ignored because of a problem with the MIME header, for example.

The simplest method to get the details may be via CSV format, as Michael Rose suggests, unless you just want the vcard contents to import the data manually.