I'm developing an app that creates a simple document with basic information created by the app. It won't contain any personal information, but it will contain data created and requested by the user. I want the user to be able to send this to themselves via email. I would also like to add the option for the user to have this file (which updates daily) to be able to send to them automatically every week/month, so they won't have to think about it. The user can set the intervals themselves.
Is this possible? The user will set up this option themselves from a menu, so it's not like they won't know it's happening. Every automatic mail will also contain information on how to turn the option back off again.
Is this possible and is it allowed by Apple?
Thanks for your reply
It is not possible from within the app. A user has to explicitly send the email through the MFMailComposeViewController.
If you want this functionality, you should build a backend for your app.
To clarify, if you want to use the users configured accounts; i.e. the account they use with Mail, then no you cannot do this automatically. The other answers rely on the fact a user enters their POP/IMAP settings, which personally I would never do.
You could use an email service as mandril or mailgun, to send emails "from your app".
Take a look at this: https://github.com/rackerlabs/objc-mailgun
There's a library called MailCore that's incredibly powerful. You can use it to send mail in the background of your app without needing to present the built in mail composer view
https://github.com/MailCore/mailcore2
Related
I am developing an iOS app targeting iOS 9 and above using Swift 3 and xCode 8.
I have a "Contact ViewController" which contains multiple forms where user enters its data to submit. Collected data also contains users' e-mail address. I am validating all the information that entered by the user correctly.
So, what I would like to do is my "send" button to send the user's all data to an e-mail address.
Is this possible without using Mail App or its interface? Do I need additional framework for such functionality?
I appreciate your time and sharing your thoughts.
This is not possible secretly. You can't send an email from the users device via the Apple Mail app because the system will not allow that. You can prepare an email with all the data that opens and let the user send it to you by tapping "Send" in the NavigationBar. So yes, you would need another framework to do that.
But I would not use emails to do that. Just use a server you send the data to or a service like Firebase.
If you really have to send E-mails, and just pushing the data to a backend API is not enough:
This is not possible using built-in functionality, but you could leverage an external mail delivery service like Mailgun to send your mails. (From a security standpoint, this should be handled by a server and not by the app itself however.)
I don't want to write my own email app. All I want is to be able redirect to mail with a preconfigured search string to display relevant emails. There doesn't appear to be a way to read or list emails from mail.app from within another app. Am I overlooking something? Is there a workaround for this?
I am fully aware of and able to use message UI in my app. What I want is to read, not send, email that has already been downloaded and exists in mail.app.
The only way that you can use to connect apps with other apps in iOS is thought url scheme.
You can take a look at Url Scheme reference
but it seems like you can't make this action.
UPDATE:
you can take a look the extra functionalities at Wikipedia
Not exactly a programming question but here it goes:
How can a company who is distributing passbook passes via email or web prevent a pass from being installed on more than one device?
I can not find anything about this on Apple docs. The only I can think of is to check on the device registration webservice whether the combination of pass type and serial has a device already registered and delete it , but I am not aware of any command to delete the pass remotely.
Another option would be to check if it is already registered prior to generating the pass but this would only work for URL distribution, not for email.
Is there any way to delete a pass remotely via push notification + update? Any ideas on how to solve this issue?
Mail and Mobile Safari will present any pass they are given and the user can decide to add them to their Passbook. There is nothing the pass creator can do to prevent it except to be careful about how the .pkpass files get handed around.
If you really only want to deliver a specific pass to a specific device you might consider a companion app that uses a custom API to communicate with the the backend and request the pass for that device that way. Then you have much more control than distribution via email or url links.
Apple frowns on trying to delete a pass programmatically; only users are supposed to delete passes because they added them. You can, however, update a pass to make it clear that is not valid and should be deleted. For example you can remove the bar code, if any, and use a background image with a big red "INVALID" on it.
Just to extend #ohmi's answer:
You cannot prevent passes from being installed on more than one
device - e.g. if user enables iCloud for Passbook, the passes will get
synced automatically across devices.
Considering your links to pkpasses are public, you may want to consider
introducing one-time download links, but while it can fill your
needs just fine, users can be really disappointed if it's impossible to re-add
passes that they manually deleted. So I wouldn't recommend such solution.
You can make you pkpass links kind of private, so only GET request originating from your application and carrying a specific value for specific header field (e.g. auth_token), will receive a pkpass file, however this way you almost disable pass distribution via email or via sharing URLs to passes and make pass updating probably impossible.
I am using MFMailComposeViewController to send an email with an attachment. In all the guides it chooses to present the view controller as a modal view so that the user can change the fields and choose to send or cancel.
I don't want people to be able to change the information that I have put in, so I was wondering if I could force it to send the email without going to the modal view?
I am aware of using a url with mailto but believe you can't add an attachment.
If anyone knows if this is possible or even better if they know how to do it I would really appreciate the assistance.
Many thanks.
No, you can't do this with MFMailComposeViewController. Apple is very specific in the docs that sending email is under the users control, not your apps. You are sending email from the users account, you can understand why access to the email is restricted I this way - a spambot would be trivial to make if this were not the case.
For the above reason I don't think you'd get an app which sends its own emails from the users account approved for the app store.
You cannot send SMS/Email without user acceptance. But there are a lot of web-services in internet which can send SMS/Email. I guess some app uses those services or uses own.
See also: How can I send mail from an iPhone application?
I would like to place an email in the iPhones email outbox, without showing the compose window to the user, so that he can not mess with the data that I want to send. Is this possible?
Thanks,
Timo
No - if you want to send an email using the user's email account you must allow them to modify the message contents: that's part of Apple's message framework. To be honest, it's a fairly sensible feature...I don't think many people would want an app that could just send things out without alerting the user or allowing them to modify it.
If you want to send a message and stop the user from messing with your data, just add an attachment and check for the attachment on the backend (assuming that because you want to send specific data)