How to open Email program via Intents (but only an Email program)

Question

I want to setup a part of my application that allows users to send a quick email to another user. It's not very hard to set this up:

Intent intent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_SEND);
intent.setType("text/plain");
intent.putExtra(Intent.EXTRA_SUBJECT, subject);
intent.putExtra(Intent.EXTRA_TEXT, message);
Intent mailer = Intent.createChooser(intent, null);
startActivity(mailer);

However, the problem is that the ACTION_SEND is accepted by more than just email programs - for example, on my phone the Facebook app, Twitter, reddit is fun, and even Bluetooth come up as viable alternatives for sending this message. The message is entirely too long for some of these (especially Twitter).

Is there a way to limit the chooser to just applications that support long messages (such as email)? Or is there a way to detect the app that the user has chosen and adjust the message appropriately?

Answer 1

Have you tried including the Intent.EXTRA_EMAIL extra?

Intent mailer = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_SEND);
mailer.setType("text/plain");
mailer.putExtra(Intent.EXTRA_EMAIL, new String[]{"[email protected]"});
mailer.putExtra(Intent.EXTRA_SUBJECT, subject);
mailer.putExtra(Intent.EXTRA_TEXT, bodyText);
startActivity(Intent.createChooser(mailer, "Send email..."));

That may restrict the list of available receiver applications...

Answer 2

Thanks to Pentium10's suggestion of searching how Linkify works, I have found a great solution to this problem. Basically, you just create a "mailto:" link, and then call the appropriate Intent for that.:

Intent intent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_VIEW);
Uri data = Uri.parse("mailto:?subject=" + subject + "&body=" + body);
intent.setData(data);
startActivity(intent);

There are a few interesting aspects to this solution:

1. I'm using the ACTION_VIEW action because that's more appropriate for a "mailto:" link. You could provide no particular action, but then you might get some unsatisfactory results (for example, it will ask you if you want to add the link to your contacts).

2. Since this is a "share" link, I am simply including no email address - even though this is a mailto link. It works.

3. There's no chooser involved. The reason for this is to let the user take advantage of defaults; if they have set a default email program, then it'll take them straight to that, bypassing the chooser altogether (which seems good in my mind, you may argue otherwise).

Of course there's a lot of finesse I'm leaving out (such as properly encoding the subject/body), but you should be able to figure that out on your own.