I want a button in Mail that automatically adds contacts to Address Book. Right now Mail has an “Add Sender to Address Book” function, but all it does is add the email address. I want the street, the city, the zip code, the phone numbers… everything.

Some emails include an “electronic business card” as an attachment, usually in a format such as .vcf. Many email applications allow you to drag-and-drop these .vcf files directly into your local address book, which is kind of nifty. However, any enthusiasm we might feel for .vcf attachments must be tempered by the fact that:

• Many people find them to be annoying.
• They present a security risk.
• Most people don’t use them. (I certainly don’t).

Now, what many people do use is a plain text signature:

James Q. Workerbee
ABC Industries, Inc.
12345 Lakeside Dr.
Pleasantville, CA 90021
Tel: 888-555-1234 x567
Fax: 888-555-1021

This certainly isn’t beautifully structured data. It would be a lot easier to retrieve the information if we had standard for, say, passing this information in the email headers or tagging this as XML.¹. That solution would be a lot easier and more fun for the programmers. But this solution depends on:

1. Deciding on a standard.
2. Waiting for email applications to implement the standard.
3. Hoping that users A) notice that this option is available and B) change their behavior in order to make use of the standard.

Rather than all that, let’s take advantage of the thing that users do already. This won’t be easy, because plain text signatures are poorly structured. Still, a phone number looks different from a street number, which looks different from a firstname and lastname, which looks different from arbitrary text, and so on. A cell phone number often starts with c:, cell:, m:, or mobile:. We don’t have million-dollar markup to go on, but there is some structure here.

Anyway, back to The Button. When you select the button, the parser makes its best guess at person’s contact information. An Address Book window appears with the information filled in. You can then save the information, edit it, or dismiss it unsaved (if the parser’s results are total garbage). As long as the failure rate is low enough, this would be a pretty sweet little feature. Admittedly, it’s not the easiest application feature to build. But ladies and gentlemen, we can build it. We have the technology. Mail.app will be that application. Better than it was before. Better… stronger… faster…

Whoops, got carried away there.

1. For all I know there are standards for doing this, in which case Step #1 is obviated.