Programming Internet Email

The vCard Version 2.1 Profile

Unlike Version 3.0, the older Version 2.1 is not an Internet proposed standard nor will it ever be. It is, however, widely implemented. Many vendors of email-related products either use vCard 2.1 as the underlying structure of their address books or allow for the importation into their proprietary format. This section will introduce vCard 2.1 and briefly show its differences from Version 3.0. The goal here is to provide enough information for the reader to successfully parse either of the two formats. In fact, since Version 3.0 is rather new as of this writing and largely unimplemented, anyone writing programs or scripts to parse vCards are encouraged to handle both versions for the near future.

By and large, types defined for Version 3.0 vCards are also available under Version 2.1, although there are some minor syntactical changes.

Anyone familiar with the last section will readily recognize the following example as a vCard. We will address each of the differences found in this example, which is the vCard for the Internet Mail Consortium.

BEGIN:VCARD N:Internet Mail Consortium FN:Internet Mail Consortium ORG:Internet Mail Consortium; EMAIL;INTERNET;WORK:[e-mail] TEL;WORK;VOICE:[phone] TEL;WORK;FAX:[phone] ADR;POSTAL:;;127 Segre Place;Santa Cruz;CA;95060;USA LABEL;POSTAL;DOM;ENCODING=QUOTED-PRINTABLE:127 Segre place=0D=0A= Santa Cruz, CA 95060=0D=0AUSA URL:http://www.imc.org/ TZ:-08:00 LOGO;GIF;ENCODING=BASE64: R01GODlhogBNAPEAAP////+AgP8AAAAAACH5BAEAAAAALAAAAACiAEOAAAL/BISpy+1i ...