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.
Related
I am so confused. My simple requirement is: i have an application which contains confirmation form i.e. nib file. It contains some textFields like name, age, email etc. I simply want when somebody click on submit button application send background and automatic email to email defined in textField. that email contain all information like name, age etc. User need not to fil anything and it should work in background. There are so many application do the same thing. I am creating booking application.
So how can i impliment this behaviour.
Apple does not provide a way to do this - and for good reason. Sending emails from the phone automatically introduces a lot of security risks.
I am willing to bet that the apps that do this use an intermediary server to which they post the data. When the data is posted then the server handles the sending of the emails.
To do this:
Send an HTTPS POST request to your server application.
From your server application, send an email via SMTP (or APIs built on top of SMTP).
Google AppEngine provides a simple and cheap way to create such a web service, running on top of Google's cloud-computing infrastructure. The sending mail from AppEngine help document includes detailed examples of how to send mail from your server application (assuming you use the Python version of Google AppEngine).
Unfortunately, there is no official feature for this but you could download a third-party library. Refer here for a couple of suggestions.
I have a nicely designed mail sending page that I have to implement. I would like to use MFMailComposeViewController to achieve this task but this comes with its own regular view. What are my options? Is there a way to use my own view with MFMailComposeViewController? Or maybe another way to send emails from the app that allow me to customize the view?
Thanks!
You may not change MFMailComposeViewController in any way. Quoth the documentation:
Important: The mail composition interface itself is not customizable and must not be modified by your application.
As far as I know, there is no other built-in way to send email from the device.
Your only other option would be to have the device contact a server of your own which would forward the email message, but then of course the message wouldn't be coming from the email address associated with the device and such.
Anomie is correct.
We created an app which had used a backend email server to send anonymous emails and we had a custom front end to collect the user message. However if you're just thinking that the composition interface needs a makeover it's really not a good approach and almost certainly will get you slammed during the submission process.
Best Reason for not messing with the interface -
. User will question authenticity of any email interface which does not resemble Apple's email interface.
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 send email in my application.
i know that this can be possible using MFMailComposeViewController.
But it popup presentModalViewController,I need to custom reception box,composer,subject like this.
simply by clicking send button i need to send email.
if it is possible can ant one please help me.
Thank u in advance.
For security and privacy reasons, Apple does not allow applications to send automatically email, and requires the user to review it and explicitly click on the Send button in order to do it.
If a regular app could present its own view to get the email data and send it, what's to stop a malicious app from sending spam emails on the user behalf to all his contacts?
Franci is right that Apple's frameworks do not allow this, but it can be done. You need to link in a custom SMTP framework to do it.
This is an example.
http://code.google.com/p/skpsmtpmessage/
I have not used that particular framework. Googling will probably provide many other options.
There's no background mail-sending class in Cocoa, but if you reallllly need to, you can build your own. A lot of mail servers will let you send mail anonymously. Read on up on the SMTP protocol, then pick a mail server and telnet into it and test it out. Then you can use network classes in Cocoa to follow the protocol programatically. It's a bit of a pain, but I've done it before.
Useful links:
NSStream
NSInpoutStream
NSOutputStream
SMTP protocol
To telnet into a server, pick a mail server, then in terminal, type telnet <server> 25 and press Enter. Then follow the protocol.
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.