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---
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title: vcards
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categories: personal
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---
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this past week my dad and I helped my grandmother with a few Computer Things. my grandfather died at the end of last year and the process of getting "Computer Things" to a usable state for my grandmother was pretty rough.
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One of the things that was unexpectedly frustrating was transferring stuff (photos, contacts, whatever) from my granddad's account to my grandmothers. as near as i can tell, a different family member had been helping my grandmother and closed several of my grandfather's old accounts. including email accounts and /iCloud/ accounts.
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normally, transferring contacts from one persons icloud to another's is pretty straight forward (there's an export button on icloud.com), but if you can't succesfully auth to icloud it gets a lot trickier. there's probably a few ways to do this, but the tack i ended up taking was:
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1. find a totally different source for the contacts (in this case, my grandfather's outlook 2010 install)
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2. export those contacts to vcards
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3. import those vcards to icloud.com under the new account
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That is the bones of what happened, but the details kept screwing me over.
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first, outlook 2010 contact exports by default come out in an outlook specific format (.msg) that cannot be imported into icloud. ok well fine, surely there's a straight forward way to deal with that.
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good news: you can directly export contacts from outlook to vcf
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bad news: its fucking hidden behind a "send as business card" dialogue option that is fucking unintuitive. thanks 2010 microsoft.
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worse news: it sends a very old .vcf format, 2.1. The minimum I could get working with icloud was 3.0
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ok well surely you can convert the 2.1 version to 3.0? in fact, what is even the difference? here is some wikipedia examples:
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```
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BEGIN:VCARD
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VERSION:2.1
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N:Gump;Forrest;;Mr.
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FN:Forrest Gump
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ORG:Bubba Gump Shrimp Co.
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TITLE:Shrimp Man
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PHOTO;GIF:http://www.example.com/dir_photos/my_photo.gif
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TEL;WORK;VOICE:(111) 555-1212
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TEL;HOME;VOICE:(404) 555-1212
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ADR;WORK;PREF:;;100 Waters Edge;Baytown;LA;30314;United States of America
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LABEL;WORK;PREF;ENCODING=QUOTED-PRINTABLE;CHARSET=UTF-8:100 Waters Edge=0D=
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=0ABaytown\, LA 30314=0D=0AUnited States of America
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ADR;HOME:;;42 Plantation St.;Baytown;LA;30314;United States of America
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LABEL;HOME;ENCODING=QUOTED-PRINTABLE;CHARSET=UTF-8:42 Plantation St.=0D=0A=
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Baytown, LA 30314=0D=0AUnited States of America
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EMAIL:forrestgump@example.com
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REV:20080424T195243Z
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END:VCARD
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```
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```
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BEGIN:VCARD
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VERSION:3.0
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N:Gump;Forrest;;Mr.;
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FN:Forrest Gump
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ORG:Bubba Gump Shrimp Co.
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TITLE:Shrimp Man
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PHOTO;VALUE=URI;TYPE=GIF:http://www.example.com/dir_photos/my_photo.gif
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TEL;TYPE=WORK,VOICE:(111) 555-1212
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TEL;TYPE=HOME,VOICE:(404) 555-1212
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ADR;TYPE=WORK,PREF:;;100 Waters Edge;Baytown;LA;30314;United States of America
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LABEL;TYPE=WORK,PREF:100 Waters Edge\nBaytown\, LA 30314\nUnited States of America
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ADR;TYPE=HOME:;;42 Plantation St.;Baytown;LA;30314;United States of America
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LABEL;TYPE=HOME:42 Plantation St.\nBaytown\, LA 30314\nUnited States of America
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EMAIL:forrestgump@example.com
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REV:2008-04-24T19:52:43Z
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END:VCARD
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```
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the thing that caused most of the issues for the contact set I was working on was the ~TEL;~ lines. the type declarations, when present, needed to be altered. to fix this is pretty simple:
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```
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cat /path/to/dir/* > all-outlook-contacts.vcf
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sed -e 's/TEL;/TEL;TYPE=/g' -e 's/VERSION:2.1/VERSION:3.0/g' ../new-contacts/all-outlook-contacts.vcf > ../new-contacts/all-CLEANED.vcf
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```
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yes thats right, ' i am very 3 now ' is most of the work lmao. this worked, but I still couldn't import the vcf files to icloud - it would think for a while, then error saying that at least one of the entries was unreadable. i skimmed through the file visually and found some lines that were interesting - on a few cards there was a LANGUAGE declaration:
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```
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cat ../new-contacts/all-outlook-contacts.vcf | grep =en
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>N;LANGUAGE=en-us:last first
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>N;LANGUAGE=en-us:last first
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>N;LANGUAGE=en-us:last first
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>N;LANGUAGE=en-us:last first
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```
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wtf is that, that isn't mentioned in the spec until vcards 4.0
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my best guess is that this is just some Fancy Colour from outlook specifically, because nobody else was talking about this based on quick google searches. I just removed it from these 4 cards and went on to import them to icloud succesfully.
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the lesson i learned during this process is:
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- don't close people's accounts right away; make sure everything is prepared before accounts are closed.
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- by the time i die i should establish a fucking runbook to go over the necessary steps for people who aren't technically inclined
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- open formats are great
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