MacMost Now 368: Send vCards in Email

You can easily export vCards from the Mac OS X Address Book and send them in email messages. The recipient can then easily add all of your contact information to their Address Book or other contact management software.

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Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary, with MacMost Now.
In today's episode, lets look at sending vcards with your email.
so before we get into today's topic, I just want to talk a little bit more about MacMost, and MacMost Now, and how people find out about it.
People find out through word-of-mouth. That means people like you blogging, Tweeting, and metioning MacMost on Facebook.
So I want to ask for your help. This week I've done five episodes of MacMost Now, and in return I want to ask people
to maybe talk about MacMost for a bit. So if you got a small blog, or perhaps you Tweet a lot, or you have a few friends
on Facebook- just mention it to them and even mention the MacMost podcast on iTunes, and even the book.
I put a few suggestions of really quick simple things that you can do to help out MacMost at MacMost.com/helpout. 
So I really appreciate it. Thanks.
So if you want to send your contact information to somebody, you may do it by email. You may send them your phone number;
of course they'll get your email address, but you could also send them a complete card. 
A vCard, is what it is. It's a little
file, an you can export it from address book attached to an email, and when they get it, they could simply use that card to add
you quickly to their address book, or to a windows contact list.
So here we are in Address Book and I've selected a contact. Let's select myself right there, and I want to create a vCard from this.
NOw, a lot of things I can do- I can Control or right-Click on it and use Export vCard. I can also with it, select file, Export, Export vCard, 
or I can simply drag and drop to the finder, to the desktop, and create this vCard file here, .vcf.
And now I can create a new message, seombody, put some text in the body, and I can also drag and drop this vCard file into the message.
And now it's going to be an attachment to that email and when they get it, they'll see that attachment. 
Now I can skip some of those step by simply dragging and dropping directly from address book to the mail.
So I'll select this and delete it, and now I will drag directly from address book into mail. Now it will skip the step of
having it as a file in the finder, and attach it to the email, and send it to the person I'm emailing.
Now say that I'm on the other end of this email, and I get an email from somebody who has attached their vCard. It's right here.
All I need to do is double-click on it, and it will open address book, and it will ask me to confirm or not whether I want to add
the vCard to my address book, and there it is.
I could also drag it to the desktop.
Another cool thing I could also do is select it and use Quicklook just by pressing the space bar to view the content without adding it to anything.
Now, you can use this for more than just your contact information. For instance, say you have a address book entry for a friend,a nd you want to 
recommend that friend to somebody for a job, you can simply attach their vcard to an email, and say, " Hey, here's the contact information for a friend of mine."
You could also attach multiple vCards, to an email, no problem with that. Just drag and drop several in there.
Now vCards are standard format so it should work with almost any kind of address book or contact software. It may not work as smoothly as you can on the
Mac with Quicklook and with drag-an-drop and stuff like that, but in general, most operating systems and software will allow you to quickly take a vCard from email,
and add it to your address book. It doesn't matter what system you're on, and it should be able to figure out the different fields, such as
phone number, address, things like that, and organize them into whatever the contact software is.
The thing I like about vCards is you can send a ton of information. For instance, say if you are traveling somewhere and somebody is
supposed to meet you at the airport, you can send them your vCard which has your home phone number, your mobile phone number, perhaps your voicemail,
your email address, text messaging, all sorts of information that they would maybe not normally have if you just send them a quick email
with just your mobile phone number.
So, that's a look at using the new vcards along with Apple mail. Hope you found it useful. 
Until next time, this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.

Comments: 2 Responses to “MacMost Now 368: Send vCards in Email”

Neil

12 years ago

How do you not send your vcard in your outgoing e-mails?
Is there a way to prevent Mail 6 from including your own vcard information?
I operate several businesses from the same iMac and I would like to not have my primarily business card included with the 2 other non related business e-mails I send to others.

Gary Rosenzweig

Your vcard is not included in outgoing email from Apple Mail.
Perhaps you have added it to your email signature? That's the only way I can think of that your vcard would be included automatically. Check your email signatures in your Mail preferences.

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MacMost Now 368: Send vCards in Email

Comments: 2 Responses to “MacMost Now 368: Send vCards in Email”

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