VCF (vCard Contact)
VCF is the standard format for electronic business cards, storing contact information — names, phone numbers, emails, addresses, photos, and social profiles. It is used for sharing contacts between phones, email clients, and CRM systems.
MIME Type
text/vcard
Type
Text
Compression
Lossless
Advantages
- + Universal support on iOS, Android, Outlook, and all contact apps
- + Human-readable plain-text format
- + Supports photos, multiple addresses, and custom fields
- + Easy to batch-import contacts from a single file
Disadvantages
- − Version differences (2.1, 3.0, 4.0) cause compatibility issues
- − Encoding issues with non-ASCII characters in older versions
- − No native support for contact grouping or relationships
When to Use .VCF
Use VCF for sharing contacts between phones, importing into address books, and exporting contacts from CRM systems.
Technical Details
VCF files are plain text starting with BEGIN:VCARD and ending with END:VCARD. Properties include FN (full name), TEL (telephone), EMAIL, ADR (address), and PHOTO (base64-encoded or URL). Multiple contacts can be concatenated in one file.
History
The Internet Mail Consortium published vCard 2.1 in 1996. Version 3.0 (RFC 2426, 2001) and 4.0 (RFC 6350, 2011) added structured addresses, photos, instant messaging, and extensibility.