When you go to the contact profile page of one of your contacts, and then click the network icon, you get an option to share the contact with any of your other contacts or groups.
But this only works for contacts and groups on your own current account profile. If you have multiple profiles (that is, multiple email addresses), you cannot transfer a contact between profiles.
You can add the profiles as one another’s contacts, but this is slow and awkward (and it means the email servers know the profiles are connected, because they see the metadata of them sending messages to each other, which may sometimes be undesirable).
I suggest adding an option to switch to another own profiles in the vcard-sharing menu.
Use example:
Alice and Bob are good friends. Neither of them really trusts Mallory, but they both need to talk to her. Alice has Mallory as a contact, but not on the account she uses to talk to Bob. She uses cross-profile contact transfer to send the contact to Bob. Bob wants to contact Mallory, but not using the account he uses to talk to Alice. He makes a new chatmail account and transfers Mallory’s contact to it. Then he uses it to talk to Mallory.
They can both delete the only contact Mallory has for them without disrupting their own communications channel.
Hi @Minim, I agree! For the record, this appears to be a specific case of the more general issue described here:
And the issue has also been mentioned in the thread here:
An account-switch button in the share screen, which is missing currently, would let you to share not just vcards but any attached file, image, voice message or webxdc app to a chat in a different profile, which would add a lot of convenience!
I just checked, and saving a contact as a VCard (in one profile) and then attaching it to a chat (in another profile) now works! That is, it displays as a usable contact instead of an attached file (I thought that was intentional, and I’m glad it isn’t). This makes the profile-switching functionality less important, though I can see it would still save time.
Also, you can’t attach a VCard to a profile with no contacts, meaning you have to add a contact from a QR scan to a new account before you can import a contact from a VCard, which is a bit roundabout.
Thank you, @peppa, for giving me an excellent workaround which I had believed not to exist.
Its a good workaround, just not so convenient and not obvious or intuitive as an account-switch button in the share screen, also for users who must unfortunately use untrustworthy apps like WhatsApp next to DC those apps can have access to your files and might see your contacts which is not ideal.
Can’t you attach the vcard in the “Saved Messages” chat if you have not any contacts and then import the contact from there?
So I can! Thank you again. That’s not even a workaround, but better; it’s a good UI.
Actually, I can attach a contact I’ve sent but then deleted, which surprised me. I guess contacts aren’t entirely gone when deleted? This could be a security concern; I’ve heard of police in Chechnya recursively arresting the phone contacts of people arrested on suspicion of homosexuality.
(sub) Feature req:
It would also be nice to be able to attach ones own profile contact to a chat: that is, send the VCard of the profile from which you are sending it. Obviously the recipient already has the contact in some form, but VCards are handy things and not all recipients will be using Deltachat.
I consider it a workaround. Its not obvious, people like us need to search on the forum how to do this, it also takes twice as many taps to do the same thing, and you must potentially expose your contacts to untrustworthy apps like WhatsApp if you also have them installed (you probably don’t but some people also use these untrustworthy apps).
This is suprising and somewhat concerning. Maybe there should be a bug report for this.
You can already do this using the paperclip unless Delta Touch works differently.
I can’t attach my own profile using the paperclip unless I first make a VCard file, since the paperclip is attach-file. And the easiest way to make a VCard file is from a connected account, using attach-contact.
You are right, I should mention the deleted-contacts-still-present thing to @lk108, the main Deltatouch dev.
You will be able to do so in the next release that will come very soon.
I just did a quick check: After deleting a contact, it does not appear in the list of VCards to attach. If you have some time, can you please open a new topic for this with steps to reproduce?