How to send background email after button press?

Question

I'm building an internal app. I want to be able to press a button, and have the app automatically send a predefined email message to a specified email address, without the user knowing. I have access to a web-server, but I'm just not quite sure on what the best way to go about doing this is.

I'm using storyboard in xcode, this is a singleview application for the ipad.

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 15 '12 at 16:30

1

If you want to use the user's mail account that they have set up in the mail.app - you can't do that without the MFMailComposeViewController.

Solutions are:

Use some Framework or roll your own mail solution that you or the user fills with their respective mail acc data and then send mails.

or

Write a little PHP/Ruby/Java/... script that sends a mail which you can trigger via web request (i.e. REST).

answered Aug 15 '12 at 16:30

pkluz

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I don't want to use the users mail account, I want to just use one that I setup on the web-server to send the messages. Would a php script be the right route? – Ben T. Aug 15 '12 at 16:37

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 15 '12 at 16:30

1

SKPSMTPMessage works well for sending emails without the need for a UI.

(Make sure you add a reference to the CFNetwork.framework in your project.)

answered Aug 15 '12 at 16:30

Ian L

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Jack Humphries · Accepted Answer · 2012-08-15T16:52:35.303

1

You can create a PHP script that can do this (code below). Use a library such as ASIHTTPRequest to post the user's email address to the script and then the script will automatically send the message.

<?php

    $to = $_POST["email"]; //this is the user's address; you can replace $_POST["email"] with "user@example.com" to try it out
    $subject = "Subject";
    $body = "Message";
    $headers = "From: Name <noreply@example.com>\r\n" . "X-Mailer: php";

    if (mail($to, $subject, $body, $headers)) {

        //sent

    }

?>

edited Aug 15 '12 at 16:52

answered Aug 15 '12 at 16:39

Jack Humphries

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Can I have this script locally on iPhone? How do I invoke it? – Paresh Masani Aug 28 '13 at 23:14
@AppleDeveloper No, PHP does not run on an iPhone. If you don't have a server to run this script, then your only other option is to connect to a mail relay and send the message with the iPhone. This is insecure and a bad idea. – Jack Humphries Aug 28 '13 at 23:55
thanks for clarifying this. I have used SMTP approach. It works great - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6284599/locking-the-fields-in-mfmailcomposeviewcontroller/6287412#6287412 – Paresh Masani Sep 01 '13 at 10:09

How to send background email after button press?

3 Answers3