vCard (RFC 6350) is the standard file format for electronic business cards, encoding contact information such as names, addresses, phone numbers, and emails. It is widely supported for exchanging contacts between applications.
vCard
vCard, standardized in its current 4.0 form as RFC 6350, is the ubiquitous file format for electronic business cards. A .vcf file encodes a person or organization’s contact details — names, phone numbers, email and postal addresses, photos, and more — in a fixed, parseable structure that virtually every address book, email client, and phone understands. It is the quiet standard behind “add to contacts” almost everywhere.
- Structured properties - Fields like
FN,N,TEL,EMAIL, andADRcarry contact data in a predictable, machine-readable layout. - Portable
.vcffiles - A single format moves cleanly between operating systems, mail clients, phones, and CRMs. - Broad interoperability - Decades of near-universal support make it the safe default for exchanging contacts.
- Extensible - Custom
X-properties and newer additions let vendors add data without breaking existing parsers.
In API operations, vCard is the interchange format contact and identity endpoints reach for when they need to hand a person or organization off to another system. APIs commonly emit text/vcard so a consumer can import a contact in one step, and directory or CRM APIs lean on it for import and export. For the linked-data and agentic web, its RDF counterpart, the vCard Ontology, carries the same model into knowledge graphs where “who” data needs to be queried and reasoned over.
