How can I create vCards from email sigs?

October 26, 2009 11:05 AM

How can I auto-magically create a vCard from an email signature? I'm growing tired of the repeated copy-and-paste operations required to make new entries in my Apple Address Book when I have a nicely formatted signature file right in front of me. Is there a script or other handy tool that will do this work for me, guessing which bit of info is the name, phone number, etc. and placing them into a new vCard for me?
posted by mfitz to technology (4 comments total)

I'm not at my Mac now, but doesn't Mail.app try and guess what telephone numbers and addresses are in a message, and let you add them to the address book. I think if it sees dates it will also let you make a new event in iCal. Oh, here is the feature description:

Data, detected. Mail does more than just show email. It also analyzes the contents to help you act on them. Say you get an email inviting you to dinner at Gino’s Pizza tomorrow at 6 p.m. Mail not only recognizes that 6 p.m. is the time, it knows that “tomorrow” represents a date on a calendar. So you can add the invitation to your iCal calendar by clicking the date, whether it’s an actual date (October 18) or a relative date (tomorrow). It also knows that Gino’s is a place, so you can click the address to view a Google map of the restaurant’s location. And if the message includes a phone number or email address, you can add it to Address Book with a click.

posted by chunking express at 12:14 PM on October 26, 2009

Ah ha! I forgot it did that. Thanks!

In fact, when I tried it out, the result was even better (in Snow Leopard) than I remembered it being last time I tried it.

In my big utopia in the sky, that feature will be extended to addresses viewed in Webmail messages, which is where most of my new contact info come. But, clearly, there are plenty of work-arounds to get the message into Apple Mail.
posted by mfitz at 1:08 PM on October 26, 2009

It might be something you can still do. Apparently all Cocoa text boxes should be able to do this thing at some point.
posted by chunking express at 1:11 PM on October 26, 2009

It's not quite as simple as it could be, but here's a relatively streamlined way to apply the data detectors to content in Safari.
posted by Cogito at 2:05 PM on October 26, 2009