internet explorer can't open vcard

Question

On my company's website, we have various professionals listed with links to download their vcard. We want to include a link to the vcard in email signatures, however when clicking a link to a vcard contained in an email doesn't work in IE (IE displays a "cannot download" error).

I've inspected the response from the webserver using Fiddler, and the vcard response is exactly the same when viewing the link on our website vs clicking the link in an email. Also confirmed that copy/pasting the link to a vcard into IE's address bar yields the same error as clicking the link in an email - IE won't open it.

It almost seems as though IE can't open a vcard unless you click a link (on a website) to the vcard. Going directly to the vcard doesn't work.

EDIT: We're seeing this issue with IE7 and IE8 only. Vcards open consistently with Firefox or Chrome.

The server response is shown below (edited to remove personal identifying info). I ran a diff between successful and failed responses in Fiddler and the only difference was the timestamp in the Date and REV fields.

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store
Date: Mon, 20 Dec 2010 21:16:43 GMT
Pragma: no-cache
Content-Length: 495
Content-Type: text/x-vcard; charset=utf-8
Expires: -1
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
Set-Cookie: website#lang=en; path=/

BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:2.1
N;LANGUAGE=en:LastName;FirstName;E.;;
FN:FirstName E. LastName
ORG:Company Name, LLP
TITLE:Attorney
TEL;PREF;WORK;VOICE:+1 999.999.9999
TEL;PREF;WORK;FAX:+1 999.999.9999
ADR;WORK;PREF:;;Suite 9999, 5555 Somewhere Street;Atlanta;GA;30309-4528;USA
URL;WORK:http://www.website.com
EMAIL;PREF;INTERNET:PERSON@Website.com
NOTE;ENCODING=QUOTED-PRINTABLE:Bar Admission(s) - Georgia (1900); Kentucky (1900)=0D=0A
REV:20101220T211643Z
END:VCARD

Answer 1

I think you can workaround this with a better HTTP headers manipulation.

I'm still not sure what you are trying to do, but I think you can use HTTP headers to force and ensure the desired behavior.

If you want a vcard to be downloaded and processed by IE or Outlook, first, provide them as a .vcf file - you can generate them on the fly, or generate them from a script and keep cached.

Then you can handle vcards to be replyed with HTTP headers:

Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=personName.vcf
Content-Type: text/x-vcard; charset=utf-8; name=personName.vcf

Once the file is provided with correct MIME type and with a valid filename and so on, client's machine will process them as they are intended to interpret.

The unique issue since those measures are taken is if client machine does not have any relation to process that mime and extension (ie, Windows hasn't this configuration set).

I just tried this with IE8, on http://www.haraldjoergens.com/ (see the footer). It worked nice.