Sending formatted email

Hi guys, in this tutorial I will show you how to send email using iPhone mail apps. Sending email from mail apps is easy and comfortable. You need to just use a mailto url + stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding + HTML.

Easier way to send e-mail on your iPhone application is using a mailto url.

        NSURL *url = [[NSURL alloc] initWithString:@"mailto:me@me.com?subject=subject&body=Hi"];

        [[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:url];

Of course you can use a format to include your own dynamic text, but the url string must be url escaped. Cocoa provides a nice way to escape URLs with stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:

So, we can escape URL from email body as following way: 
NSString *encodedBody =[eMailBody stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];

The only problem left was representing tabular data. The body parameter of mailto is actually parsed as HTML.
So, amazing as it seems, this code works:

            NSString *eMailBody = @"<table><tr><td style='text-align:right'><b>Name</b>:</td><td>Zubair</td></tr><tr><td style='text-align:right'><b>Surname</b>:</td><td>Raihan</td></tr><tr><td style='text-align:right'><b>Occupation:<b/></td><td>Programmer</td></tr></table>";

           

            NSString *encodedBody =[eMailBody stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];

           

            NSString *urlString =[NSString stringWithFormat:@"mailto:me@me.com?subject=HiPhone&body=%@", encodedBody];

            NSURL *url = [[NSURL alloc] initWithString:urlString]; 
            [[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:url];

That’s it now we are ready for sending email using mail apps.

Device vs Simulator

Since the iPhone simulator does not have a Mail.app, you can use e-mail URLs only in the actual device. As a matter of fact, it’s better to create specific simulator/device code:

#if TARGETIPHONESIMULATOR           

     //compiler specific code           

#else           

     // device specific code           

#endif

In my app, I use a UIWebV iew in the simulator code, so I can preview the email HTML text in the simulator.