How is Yahoo able to send push notifications for email to iPhone/iOS in general? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push-IMAP is as far as I've gotten in my research, but I'm not sure what exactly Yahoo is doing. I'm planning to setup my own mail server and I'm curious how Yahoo is able to push but others like Gmail is not.
I should mention I'm referring to the default Mail app, not Yahoo's custom mail app (not sure if they even have one).
Thanks!
Yahoo's IMAP server has a special capability 'XYMAPPLEPUSHSERVICE', which presumably is a proprietary way to negotiate use of Apple Push Notification Service
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I would like to know if there is a way how I can send e-mails with preferabel php or JS without needing an actual mail server. I am pretty sure it won't work, but have any of you an idea how there could be a way?
You can send mail with a lot of services, I believe they are called 'exchange' mail services. Gmail, outlook (or live, hotmail) are examples of these services. Google is full of examples :-)
I'd like to write an application which monitors a mailbox (ideally a Gmail mailbox). In brief, my question is how do I listen to incoming emails? I could always keep pulling emails but I am afraid that this doesn't scale very well.
How does iOS do it with Gmail? I think they are using Exchange protocol, but I am not sure. Does anybody have an idea on how to do it? Is there a solution which already does something similar? I just need a hook.
Thanks!
The most universal "API" for monitoring a Gmail or Google Apps inbox is the IMAP protocol. There's some information about this here:
Gmail IMAP OAuth for desktop clients
For Google Apps inboxes (not general consumer Gmail accounts), you can also use the Gmail Inbox Feed, which provides an AtomPub XML feed of unread messages in a Google Apps inbox:
http://code.google.com/apis/gmail/docs/inbox_feed.html
The "API" to GMail is IMAP.
In IMAP the IDLE feature is used to tell the server to notify the client when there are changes to the mailbox.
IDLE is defined in RFC 2177 IDLE is an optional IMAP feature so this may or may not work on other IMAP servers.
If you just want to talk to Gmail, they have a REST API you can use and it supports push notifications (e.g. webhooks):
https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/guides/push
But again this is a Gmail-specific API, which may fit you requirements or not. If you are fine just being specific to Gmail it is likely easier and better to work with from a web/mobile type environment than something like IMAP.
i want(i mean client :)) to send an email from a particular account.
in my app there is an option of sending a mail.
now i want to do as any one from any ipad sends email from using this app will sent by one particular account.
How can i do so?
Thanks,
Shyam
From this link
By looking at the class reference for MFMailComposeViewController in the documentation, I'd say you can't do anything about it. It's not very flexible unfortunately, same as sending SMS, and there you can't MMS with it, just SMS.
You can't specify a default email address. If you could, I suspect one could view this as a security risk for spam/unsolicited mail.
You can't using Apple's API, it will use the Mail app and whatever account is setup in there. You'll have to grab full sendmail client code and incorporate it into your app.
I need to be able to send a pre-formatted email or SMS text message programmatically from within an iphone app. Can this be done? I have looked at apple's MFMailComposeViewController class, but this "provides a standard interface that manages the editing and sending an email message" and the MFMessageComposeViewController class also has it's own "standard system interface for composing SMS text messages". These allow you to present an interface to the user where they have to fill in all the data and then explicitly press a send button.
I cannot use this boilerplate functionality.
I need to be able to send a message without presenting any interface to the user. I know this sounds evil, but actually it is for a commercial application which needs to communicate to a user group in a central office when users in the field have performed specific actions out in the field.
Has anyone found a solution to this?
After much investigation, I have found that sending emails programmatically, without user intervention, from an iphone application, cannot be implemented using any of the apple frameworks.
Set up a web service you can post to using an HTTP request. If you are posting to only one address this can work very well, although you may want to get the user to input their return mail address.
Otherwise only the standard dialog is available (this relies on using whatever account they've setup on the device).
Here are a few SMTP API's that work on OS X. They might work on iOS as well.
Pantomime
MailCore
EdMessage
Only Possible via Web Interface, you can not hide the Interface , this is as per apple Guidlines to Developer and as per documentation
Looking for a solution to such a problem, I found something interesting here: How to send mail from iphone app without showing MFMailComposeViewController?
I hope this will be useful!
This is standard not possible. If you can't use the standard dialog you need to use SMTP.
SMS is the same, use the dialog of use a webbased sms service (most of these cost some money).
I have no experience with iOS, but I have enough experience with email protocols to say I'd be very surprised if a client application could send email without accessing a server. More than likely, the email will be sent using the SMTP protocol and therefore must be sent using an SMTP server. Choosing how you connect to that server is about the only option you have. You could connect to a server-side script (such as php) to generate and send the email, or you may be able to create a socket and connect directly to port 25 on the SMTP server and still generate the email from you client application.
Check out:
RFC 5321 at https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5321
SMTP on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Mail_Transfer_Protocol
You could always do a low level telnet using SMTP protocol to a known mail server to send a message. I don't know if Apple will reject the app, but SMTP is damned simple.
I want to send mail from an iPhone app without showing an MFMailComposeViewController. I also want this mail to be sent from the user's default Mail account. Is it possible to do this?
This is not supported by the iPhone SDK, probably because Apple doesn't want you to do it.
Why not? My guess: Because it's easy to abuse. If we knew user's email address, we could spam them, we could fake emails from them, etc. Imagine finding out an iPhone app sent an email as you without your knowledge -- not cool, even if the app had good intentions.
So, anything you do to get around that, is likely to get you rejected from the app store.
Having said all that, you could basically write your own smtp interaction code to chat with the user's outgoing mail server. For example, if the user has a gmail account, you could ask them for their email and password, you'd have to know how to talk to the gmail servers, and send email through them.
Going that route means asking the user for their username, password, and either asking for or figuring out their mail server information. Another choice is to send directly from the phone (your own smpt server, not just a client), which is a bit more coding. And if you write your own server, the mail you send is more likely to be blocked since your originating IP might not match the domain on the sender's email.
There also exist some libraries that might help out. Previous related question:
Open Source Cocoa/Cocoa-Touch POP3/SMTP library?
There are legitimate reasons for wanting to send an email. (Such as communicating with a server using SMTP instead of HTTP)
This blog post should get you going: http://vafer.org/blog/20080604120118
It is possible to use MFMailComposeViewController without user interaction. See my answer on the iPhone send email not using MessageUI question.