The purpose of the imc-vcard list

["Paul E. Hoffman" <phoffman@xxxxxxx>]

Greetings again. It is clear that many folks on this list are here for
something that they are not receiving, and I apologize if the intent of the
list wasn't clear. This list is for people who are developers of
vCard-compatible software, not for "end users". Of course, all are welcome
to be here, but if you subscribed hoping to hear about new implementations
of the technology, this is probably the wrong place.

Briefly, the vCard technology has been developed over the past few years,
and is now starting to be implemented in more and more software. For
example, both Microsoft and Netscape are shipping beta-test software with
vCard capabilities in them. They aren't really "vCard viewers"; instead,
vCard is used in the programs to hold mailing information.

IMC fully expects other vCard implementations to appear soon from both
large and small companies. For example, Lotus is quite committed to the
vCard standard, and has committed a great deal of employee time to helping
move the standard forward in the IETF. There are also smaller companies
that have told us that they intend to ship products "sometime soon". Well,
we all know what *that* means in the software world.

If you're not a developer, but want to keep up on who's shipping what for
vCard, I suggest that you come to the IMC Web site about once a month. Now
that we're seeing more shipping products, we're about to start a list so
that end users can see which products support the vCard technology (the
lists we have now are of the companies who have said they would). This list
will probably be of little interest except to developers or marketing
people working at companies developing vCard-compliant software. Again,
everyone's welcome to stay and participate, and we're not trying to shoo
anyone out.

--Paul E. Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium