Link to home
Start Free TrialLog in
Avatar of nickg5
nickg5Flag for United States of America

asked on

How to open a .vcf file

Verizon allows you to send a text by e-mail. Both ends can open and read the contents but the person who has the phone with text only can not initiate a text to an e-mail address. So I got a text from a relative who is now out of touch. I can not contact them. They had kept a previous e-mail text from me so they could use the reply key and technically initiate a new message. The were two files. One was a text file and it opened right up. The other part of the same message, an attachment I guess shows as a vcf file.
It shows on the desktop as a .vcf file. In the download folder it shows as a zip file. I tried to right click and extract and there is no extract option. Vista Home Basic.
All of these text are no more than 180 bytes. That is the limit. This file I can not open is 119 bytes so there is some content there.
SOLUTION
Avatar of Scott Fell
Scott Fell
Flag of United States of America image

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
Avatar of nickg5

ASKER

I changed the name from .vcf to .txt and no luck. It's a zip file when the mouse hovers over it.
Avatar of nickg5

ASKER

This is what we see:

File Type: vCard File

File Extension: .vcf

Description: This file contains a business card with contact information.
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
Avatar of nickg5

ASKER

When I change the name to a txt it says the change can ruin the contents. Change back to .vcf and get the same message.
I downloaded from the above link > inserted the vcf file and it opened in Excel if that is the way it is supposed to work. Nothing there but my e-mail address which is missing 3 characters. I asked the sender to tell me what they sent and they said everything was discussed by phone today. So with their health issues, I do not know what they sent and why the vcf file has never been part of their messages to me.

A link to a free editor does not open.
I'll just forget it for now.
I am just posting this comment for the information of any other people who migt come across this question.

>>> "When I change the name to a txt it says the change can ruin the contents. Change back to .vcf and get the same message." <<<
Just for information, that is standard Windows behaviour.  Doing so will not ruin the contents unless you opened it in the wrong application and then SAVED it.  The warnings are there to prevent people from doing that.  It is always betrter to work with a copy of the file in case you are tempted to click the save button in whatever application the file opened in.

A *.VCF file is a vCard - an "electronic business card".  It is a text-based file, but comprises TAGS that define the fields such as first name, last name, address, mobile number, home phone, business phone, email address, etc.  There have been different versions of the vCard format over the years, and recent versions support the embedding of a digital image, but they are all essentially based on actual text (rather than unreadable code) and the fields are separated by a delimiter.

Variants of vCards, for instance the X-Card, use either XML or HTML to create the different TAGS, but all standard VCF cards should use uppercase TAG NAMES for the different entities like first name, last name, and so on, and semicolons as field separators within those entities.

Most email clients with built-in contacts allow you to export a contact to the vCard format and also to import one to the contacts list, but as others have already mentioned you should be able to view the text content by opening it in a plain text editor.

Here is an example of a version 2.1 VCF file with the extension changed to *.TXT:
example-vcf.txt
and here are the contents:
BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:2.1
N:Bazonka;Billy;Algernon;Dr
FN:Billy Bazonka
NICKNAME:Baz
TEL;HOME;VOICE:01698829456789
TEL;HOME;FAX:98765432109876
ADR;HOME:;;1 Anywhere Street;Browntown;;TX 98765;Texas
LABEL;HOME;ENCODING=QUOTED-PRINTABLE:1 Anywhere Street=0D=0ABrowntown TX 98765=0D=0ATexas
EMAIL;PREF;INTERNET:billybazonka@somemail.com
REV:20161224T110948Z
END:VCARD

Open in new window


Those fields would be identified by an address book application or email client's built-in contacts when being imported, and the data against them would be "mapped" to the respective fields in that application.

Some email clients in certain versions of Windows, and in some cases also webmail, downloads attachments with unknown extensions as *.ZIP files when you save them locally.  If a VCF file was zipped up into a ZIP file, it would only usually show the file name of the vcf card inside it when you hung the mouse over it or opened it in a plain text editor.  Some other file type renamed as a *.vcf file would show the VCF file type propertes when hovered over with the mouse.

There are a few possibilities why your attachment does not seem to be a conventional vCard:

1. The "send text message as email" functionality of Verizon screwed up the contents.
2. It never was a *.vcf file to start with, but somewere in the transmission it has been interpreted as one and the extension added to it.
3. You are seeing the *.vcf extension but there is another one after that and you have Windows Explorer set to hide extensions of known file types.
Avatar of nickg5

ASKER

Bill
It's turning up on every text the relative sends to me. They are sending text to my e-mail and I am able to reply back like a standard e-mail on my end but on their end it is a text. Before the last couple weeks I was able to send a message to this text only relative (they have no e-mail program) and fill in the entire body with up to 180 characters. That ended. My guess is that Verizon did not know text could be sent by e-mail and they closed the crack. Now the only way for us to communicate is with my words in the subject line and their words in the body of the e-mail I receive after I have downloaded or opened their message in a new tab.
I assume this vcf file is nothing important but I can not open it to know. I'll post screen shots showing it being seen as a zip file.
Avatar of nickg5

ASKER

Sorry, I did not think I closed this question.
Here are three things I get when the choices are download, right click open, etc.

1. Is what it I see in the e-mail. Sometimes that arrives with the specific persons text and some times it does not.
2. Is is the download folder showing as .vcf.
3. shown as a zip.

That ng@comporium is not my e-mail address so I do not know where that comes from.

User generated imageUser generated imageUser generated image
Let's start with some fundamentals.

An email message uses MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) standard.  There is no sense in getting into this too deeply, because it is well explained here, but let me first address the issues with sending a text message from a mobile phone to an email recipient.

In a proper email the message body and any attached or embedded content is split into multiple parts within the transmission and has headers applied to each chunk of content in order that the mail reading application can figure out how to handle the different parts.  The headers identify whether the content is plain text or some other type, and a "Content Type" description like "image/jpeg" is also applied.  Tis means that the email reader has two ways of knowing what a vCard attachment is - by the *.vcf file extension and by the Content Type description "text/x-vcard". If the email reader is installed on the recipient's computer, it should be able to show the icon that is associated for particular file type attachments by referring to the file association stored in the user's registry settings, but when reading mail as Webmail it will tend to guess what icon to show.

I don't know a lot about how a mobile phone takes a text message and converts it to an email, but my guess is that it converts non-text content into chunks that it attaches rather than embeds.  I would guess that in your case the message body is contained in the "text_1.txt" attachment and email address information has been attached as a VCF file.  My guess would have been that the VCF file contains the sender's email address, but in this case the sender is a phone number, so it is probable that it instead contains your email address and the file name reflects the entry that your email address was stored against on the sender's phone eg. your initials NG rather than your full name.  I am guessing here though.  There must be a bit of jiggery-pokery going on as a text message is transmitted by SMS and converted to an email message.

I would guess that you have absolutely no means to reply to the message because it was sent from a mobile phone number rather than through an email account, and the only thing that might be revealed by digging into the message might be the sender's mobile phone number.

The standard file naming convention for contact details that are exported to a vCard is to use the contact's name rather than the email address, however if an email address had been automatically added to somebody's address book when an email address was typed into the "To" field, it would not yet have a name against it and the contact details would probably export to a VCF file with part or all of the email address as the file name.

OK, looking at your bottom screenshot where the attachment has been saved as a ZIP file, you seem to have *.zip files associated with Microsoft Word.  If you do not have an installed handler for ZIP files (WinZip, 7-Zip, WinRAR, etc), then Windows still has native support for "quickviewing" and unpacking ZIP files.  However, this could also be what I was referring to earlier when I mentioned that some email readers download certain file types and add the wrong extension in so doing.

I mentioned previously that some modern versions of the vCard use XML format to designate fields of a contact's details for an address book entry.  This is an example of XML tags:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCard#xCard

MS Word files from MS Office 2007 are just multiple "layout" files in XML format that are all wrapped up as standard ZIP files, but have DOCX, XLSX, and so on as extensions rather than *.ZIP.  If the email reading application cannot figure out what to do with an attached *.vcf file it might well have looked at the contents and seen XML layout.  I frequently have issues where Microsoft Office Outlook and the Outlook Web Interface save DOCX files as *.ZIP files when I save the attachment, and sometimes vice versa.

From your bottom screenshot it looks as though the "ZIP file" contains a URL to the login page of comporium.net with the "ng@comporium.net.vcf" file as the login parameter.  What happens when you type that whole URL into the Address bar of your browser and go to it?

My guess is that this would be the means to pick up and read the message in comporium.net's webmail in the event that the message has been received on a basic phone as SMS text or other basic format where themessage body in the attached *,txt file isn't visible - almost like a "login to read this message".  A similar thing happens if somebody sends a photo from a mobile phone as a "Multimedia Text Message" to somebody who has a basic mobile phone that is unable to display te photo.  This is largely a thing of the past now, but the recipient would receive a URL and temporary password to visit the telecommunications provider's website to see the photo.

Did you say that you had tried renaming copies of the ZIP file to a TXT file and a DOCX file to see whether it would open in Notepad or Word?

What happens when you log in to your Hotmail (or whatever it is now called) to read your messages in webmail, and try to import the VCF file into the contacts?
Avatar of nickg5

ASKER

I did change the name and had no success opening it. My parent has an iPhone but refuses to get an e-mail address. I do not have texting because I was getting several text a week from telemarketers and each one was costing $$. I disabled texting. Then I was told how to send a text by e-mail. It worked great. I enter the phonenumbergoeshere@vzwpix.com. And sent what on my end was an e-mail with images if desired. The other end received them as a text since they have no e-mail. Everything worked fine until maybe 3 weeks ago. Suddenly they could not see the body of the text except some message related to either the ISP I'm using on Verizon. So, my guess was that they did not know text could be sent by e-mail and closed the crack. We can still communicate the same way but my text has to be put in the "subject" line of the e-mail. I tried putting a URL in the subject line and they can not view the photo, etc. They could get e-mail for free but they refuse. I am not going to pay $8-$10 a month extra for phony text that come from unknowns. Not to mention the cost of receiving text from this relative and they like to send many per day. The cost would be way up there.
Circumventing physical obstructions isn't always guaranteed to work, unfortunately.  Somebody is always going to figure out a workaround to address an issue as you have described, but there always comes a time with workarounds where they no longer work until somebody else comes up with another idea or modifies the original concept.  When you have different platforms, transmission protocols, and technologies,  each with their own limitaions, you are always going to be reliant on some kind of intermediary to do the conversion.  Unfortunately things change and the intermediary service or device sometimes stops working.

With one person who has an iPhone and refuses to get an email address, and you not wanting to pay for SMS text, you are stuck with using some kind of convoluted service sitting in between to make things work.  It's like the iPhone user wanting to use FaceTime for video calls and refusing to download Skype for iOS, and the person at the other end refusing to use anything other than Skype on Android.