Here’s is a simple tip that was new to me.
There are two ways to add a vCard with your contact information to a Mail.app signature.
An old post on macOSXHints details how to add it 
as a hyperlink to a remotely-stored vCard file, so that recipients can download it into their Address Books easily.
The end result is nice and clean and saves bandwidth:
If you don’t give two figs about bandwidth, you can simply export your card from Address Book.
Then drag it onto a signature in the Signature pane of Mail’s preferences, and your vCard goes out with every signed email:
Of course, it is possible to share more information than you mean to or more than your recipients want. It might be a good idea to create a special Address Book card for this before exporting it.
“Of course, it is possible to share more information than you mean to or more than your recipients want. It might be a good idea to create a special Address Book card for this before exporting it.”
Or, you could use the slightly longwinded but built-in method in Address Book:
In Address Book’s Prefs, go to the pref tab called ‘vCard’ and click the checkbox labelled ‘Enable private “Me” card’. Then close the prefs and go to the ‘me’ person in address book – that should be you.
Click the Edit button at the bottom of Address Book’s main window, and lo – every item in your record now has it’s own checkbox to the left. Deselect the checkbox next to an item, and it now won’t be included in the vCard for your own record whenever you export it from Address Book. Other non-Me records aren’t affected by the setting.
The main advantage is not then having two records for yourself, which might then fall out of sync.
A good trick when using vCards is, before adding it to anything public, to open the vCard with a capable text editor (BBEdit, TextWrangler, TextMate…) and read the contents of the file.
It’s a bit boring (tag soup) but very understandable and allows for painless removal of stray bits of information one may not want to share, as well as of Apple-only tags, if present.
yeah …
i dont wanna give all my contact info to just everyone that i mail to …
better create a second Vcard for that …
1.4kb is gonna make a difference in bandwith … ?
if u say so …
Nice tip on the private “Me” card, thanks.
Gah, I hate it when people include their vCard in every email — for the following reasons:
1. I have your contact info. Actually, I now have it hundreds of times.
2. Your emails show up when I sort or smart-folder to look for emails with attachments. I want to find that file you sent me, not every email you’ve ever sent!
3. It’s just annoying :)
Hello,
I have a signature including my vCard that I use accidentally since ages. I didnt do any exporting stuff, just dropped the vCard into the Signature composition pane of Mail preferences.
I was quite astonished that it is not bound to AddressBook dynamically. When I relocated and adapted my vCard, then sent out mails to notify people about my new address, they got the old one. I had to remove the signature, create a new one, then quit and start mail to use the updated version of my vCard. Phew, thats stupid. Still, I like to use this feature to notify people about changed phone numbers and email addresses which happens more often then expected.
So be warned if you use vCards as attachments that they arent what they seem to be but only textual copies of the vCards content at the time of creation.
Christian
I have had problems with some vcards being seen as spam or viruses in the past… but great tip none the less.
How to Add a vCard to Your Mail Signature…
The use of vCards (electronic business cards) can make exchange of one’s personal information much easier and more efficient. Including an option to download your vCard in your email signature line is a quick, easy option that you should consider….
This is a great idea. I’ve just been getting settled into Highrise (37signals) which is all about contact management. vCards play a huge role. The diggest problem with just attaching a vCard is that it shows up as an actual attachment in an email. Everytime I used to recieve an email from a cousin of mine, I thought she was sending me a file as there was a little paper clip in that column. Turns out it was just her vCard which was set to be included each time…
I am trying to add a link to a signature in my latest version of mail (ver. 3.5). When you control-click the menu now says link–edit. When I click on it, nothing happens. Any advice?
Thanks in advance.
We have Lotus Notes – is there a way to attach a vcard into Lotus Notes?