There is nothing special about storing the vCard data - as there is nothing special about storing iCalendar data - as long as there are well-defined Content-Types for them. Note: the RFCs above are talking about the vCard 3.0, vCard 2.1 has the text/x-vcard content type. Unfortunately, vCard 2.1 cannot be depreciated yet.
The real problems start to appear when you want to store vCard (or iCalendar) information with attachments. Again, there is nothing special from the standards point of view, but if you really want to create a groupware application, you want to SEND groupware data, too - not only store it in your local mailboxes. And if you want to send it, you want it to be understood. And if you are in the groupware business, you want it to be understood by Microsoft Exchange and/or Outlook client. That's where the fun begins. For starters - some of the formats that Outlook generates (when used in the "Internet" mode) are not understood by Exchange and vice versa.
I do not think that this is the right topic for the IMAP protocol discussion group, especially because there is no problem with protocols and standards, but with particular products - but if there is any interest, we can discuss this.
The current versions of CommuniGate Pro store address books as vCards, you can see how it's done there - but again, if someone wants to write a client that just follows the standards, it's a no-brainer.
A "recommendation" RFC that specifies what should be placed in the Subject: and other headers would be good, because we (and others) store the primary E-mail in the To: header, not in From: (as suggested below) - so there is already some de-facto standard. Also, we use some X- header to indicate that the contact has a Certificate data in it, so the user can immediately see that she can send an encrypted E-mail to that Contact.
A much more important task - IMHO - is to create an RFC about storing "Contact Group" information. Old-time players as Lotus and Microsoft did not address this issue at all, so there is no even a de-facto standard. We use some vCard-like format for Groups, but it does not store "link"-type info, so this is a tabula raca.
Sincerely, Vladimir
On Thu, 09 Oct 2003 21:22:01 +0100 Alexey Melnikov <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Holger Mauermann wrote:
Each message in the addressbook folder is one contact. The message/contact has two parts, a plaintext (human readable) part and a vCard attachment. The Subject: header is the contacts display name, the From: header its primary eMail address. So it's easy to access and read the address book folder with any IMAP client. You can sort, search, thread, copy the contacts like real mail messages. And it's possible to import/export the vCard attachments.
Is there a document describing this format? If there is none, I would recommend to write a quick draft on this first.
Regards, Alexey
