How to open .VCF files (vCard contacts) on Android, Windows and Linux

Someone shares a contact and you receive Sam Taylor.vcf. A booking site emails invitation.ics. A colleague forwards a message as Re: Contract.eml. Tap one of them and it either does nothing, or goes straight into your contacts or calendar before you’ve had a chance to see what’s inside.

All three formats are plain text underneath. Folders opens them in its text editor on Android, Windows and Linux, so you can read every field first. When you’re happy, your contacts or calendar app does the importing.

What is a .vcf file?

A .vcf file is a vCard: the standard format for electronic business cards. Each contact sits between BEGIN:VCARD and END:VCARD, one property per line:

BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:3.0
FN:Sam Taylor
TEL;TYPE=CELL:+44 20 7946 0123
EMAIL:sam@example.com
END:VCARD

One file can hold a single contact or thousands of them: when you export all your contacts from a phone, they usually come out as one .vcf. There are three versions in common use, 2.1, 3.0 and 4.0, and contact photos are stored inside the file as long blocks of encoded text.

Two related text formats travel the same way:

Extension	What it is	Where you meet it
.vcf	vCard: one or many contacts	Phone contact exports, contacts shared in chat apps, email signatures
.vcard	The same, with a longer extension	Less common, same contents
.ics	iCalendar: events, invitations, recurring meetings, between BEGIN:VEVENT and END:VEVENT	Meeting invites, ticket and booking confirmations, calendar exports
.eml	A complete email in MIME format: headers, body and attachments	Messages saved from Thunderbird, Outlook or webmail, emails forwarded as attachments

How to open a .vcf file with Folders

On Android:

1. Install Folders from the download page and give it access to your files.
2. Find the file, usually in Downloads or in your chat app’s folder, or search for it.
3. Tap it to read it in the text editor.
4. If it’s still in an email or a chat, tap it there and choose Open with → Folders.
5. To import it, long-press the file in Folders to select it, choose All actions… from the menu, then Open with… → Another app, and pick your contacts or calendar app.

On Windows and Linux:

1. Browse to the file in Folders and double-click it.
2. On Windows, the installer adds Folders to File Explorer’s Open with menu for these types: right-click → Open with → Folders. Your usual mail, contacts or calendar program stays the default.

What you can do with it in Folders

• Check a contact before it lands in your phone: the name, numbers, emails, address and any notes. Find helps in a big export, for example to look for one person or count the BEGIN:VCARD lines.
• Read an invitation properly. In an .ics file, DTSTART and DTEND give the times (a Z at the end means UTC), RRULE says how often it repeats, and you can see the organiser, the place and any meeting link before you accept.
• Look at an email’s headers. An .eml shows From, Reply-To, Return-Path, the Received lines of every server it passed through, and often an Authentication-Results line with SPF and DKIM checks. That’s useful when an email seems suspicious.
• Edit and Save: correct a name in a vCard, delete a duplicate contact block, change an event’s title. Find and replace (with Match case) and Go to line work as in any text file.
• Large exports with photos open in a fast read-only view first, where Find still works.

Folders shows these files as text. It doesn’t add contacts or events itself, and in an .eml, attachments appear as long blocks of encoded text rather than files you can open.

Other ways to open .vcf files

• Your phone’s contacts app imports .vcf files (in Google Contacts, look under Fix & manage → Import from file); calendar apps import .ics.
• Google Contacts and Google Calendar on the web both have an Import option.
• Thunderbird (free, Windows and Linux) opens .eml messages and imports contacts and calendars; Outlook does too on Windows.
• Evolution and GNOME Contacts handle these formats on Linux.

Problems opening a .vcf file?

• Names look like “Ren=C3=A9”. That’s vCard 2.1’s quoted-printable encoding for accented letters. Contacts apps decode it when importing; in the text view you see it raw.
• Only one contact was imported from a big file. Some apps read only the first card. Import through Google Contacts on the web, which takes the whole file.
• An event shows up at the wrong time. Check the time zone. Times ending in Z are UTC and your calendar converts them; times with no zone at all are taken as local time wherever you are.
• An .eml looks like code. It’s the raw message. For the formatted email and its attachments, open it in Thunderbird or Outlook.

Questions people ask

How do I open a VCF file on Android? Tap it in Folders to read it. To save the contacts, use Open with… → Another app and choose your contacts app.

How do I convert a VCF file to CSV or Excel? Import it into Google Contacts or Outlook, then export the contacts as CSV. Folders reads and edits vCards but doesn’t convert them.

Are .ics and .eml files safe to open? Reading them as text is safe: nothing in them runs, and Folders doesn’t open an email’s attachments when it shows the .eml. The risk is in what they point to, such as a phishing link in an invite or a harmful attachment you later open elsewhere.

What’s the difference between .vcf and .vcard? None. Both are vCard files; .vcf is the far more common extension.

Contacts and invites often arrive through chat apps: see how to find WhatsApp and Telegram files and how to open TXT and other text files, or browse all 382 file types Folders opens.