When is a VCF not a VCF? (Outlook 2000)

Topic

New Reply

One of my colleagues attached two VCF’s to an email to me. If I click on the VCF it opens as a contact, but if I then click “Save and Close” it doesn’t go into my contacts database. If I try to Save Attachments to a temp directory to try the Import VCF routine, it saves as a “name.msg” format. If I change the extension to name.vcf the import routine tells me it’s not a valid VCF.

What’s going on? My colleague and I both work for the same company so we both have the same (corporately mandated) version of Outlook.

Reply | Quote

Replies

Did you try dragging-&-dropping the VCFs from the e-mail into Contacts?

Reply | Quote

Well duhhhh.

Ok that worked – chalk it up to yet another Microsoft “feature”?

Reply | Quote

If you add Contacts to a message using Insert>Item…, they are not really in VCF format. Ditto drag-and-drop. The only reliable way I see in Outlook 2000 to send a Contact record as a vCard is to highlight the Contact and choose Actions>Forward as vCard. But this is a one-at-a-time deal; you’d have to drag them into one message to send them together.

Is there a better way?

Reply | Quote

You can (OK, I can ) select multiple Contacts via Ctrl-Click and then right click on of them, select Forward, and they appear to all be placed into an empty e-mail as valid VCards …

Reply | Quote

If I do that, and then, in the new message, right-click one of the little contacts and Save As…, they are proprietary .msg files and not standards-compliant .vcf files.

But , the Forward as vCard option is available from the Tools menu when multiple contacts are selected. I should’ve checked that in the first place.

Reply | Quote

I’m home on XP now, was on 2000 before, but I can create a draft message by the method I described above (Ctrl-Click multiple discontigous, right click and Forward as) and then drag and drop the contacts in the message ONE-BY-ONE (d&d multiple VCFs doesn’t seem to work) into a test Contacts folder, where they are successfully created as Contacts. See if it works for you, Jefferson.

Reply | Quote

John, I’ll take your word for it. I just like to send a real VCF file when I say that’s what I’m sending.

Reply | Quote

I agree with you sir. I get an email with what looks like contact information, I double click and it opens in the contacts style, it even has the “Save and Close” tab at the top, so, to me, humble user that I am, it looks like a duck, it sounds like a duck, it even SMELLS like a duck, but in reality, it’s another Microsoft Turkey !!

Reply | Quote