Adding links to an email message

Question

I was wondering if it is possible to hook into the gmail and email applications and check to see if it contains text that matches a regular expression, and if it does, make that text into a link with a URI that would open my application. What i am thinking of is similar to how the gmail application can detect a web address or phone number and make it a link. Is something like this possible?

Answer 1

The Gmail app is closed source and you only have the hooks they give you. AFAIK regular-expression-to-hyperlink-conversion isn't one of them:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/926770/extending-androids-default-gmail-email-applications

Depending on what you're doing, you might be able to send mail through some kind of gateway which does this work on the message prior to delivery. So rather than emailing [email protected] people could write to [email protected], and the work of translating phrases into URIs could be done at example.com then forwarded to gmail.com with links in place...

But people are link-savvy these days. You can make links plenty readable, for instance look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL ...fairly obvious, no magic required and I can enter that even without Google's help.