Back again with a new answer. I’m still leaving my previous code up though, because I’m still not convinced that there’s not a way to make use of it. I’ll keep at it myself. The following code DOES work. Mustafa suggests base64 encoding the images, and says that they only work Apple to Apple, but that’s not actually true. Base64 encoding does work with most mail clients now (IE previously didn’t support it, but now it is supported for images up to a certain size, though I’m not sure exactly what the size is). The problem is that mail clients like Gmail would strip out your image data, but there’s a simple workaround for that… just putting <b> and </b> tags around your <img ...> tag is all you need to do to keep it from getting stripped out. In order to get an image into your email, you need to get a base64 encoder into your project. There are several out there (mostly C though), but the simplest ObjC one I found was called NSData+Base64 by Matt Gallagher (I took the “+” out of the name after copying it in because it gave me problems). Copy the .h and .m files into your project and be sure to #import the .h file where you plan on using it. Then code like this will get an image into your email body…
- (void)createEmail {
//Create a string with HTML formatting for the email body
NSMutableString *emailBody = [[[NSMutableString alloc] initWithString:@"<html><body>"] retain];
//Add some text to it however you want
[emailBody appendString:@"<p>Some email body text can go here</p>"];
//Pick an image to insert
//This example would come from the main bundle, but your source can be elsewhere
UIImage *emailImage = [UIImage imageNamed:@"myImageName.png"];
//Convert the image into data
NSData *imageData = [NSData dataWithData:UIImagePNGRepresentation(emailImage)];
//Create a base64 string representation of the data using NSData+Base64
NSString *base64String = [imageData base64EncodedString];
//Add the encoded string to the emailBody string
//Don't forget the "<b>" tags are required, the "<p>" tags are optional
[emailBody appendString:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"<p><b><img src="data:image/png;base64,%@"></b></p>",base64String]];
//You could repeat here with more text or images, otherwise
//close the HTML formatting
[emailBody appendString:@"</body></html>"];
NSLog(@"%@",emailBody);
//Create the mail composer window
MFMailComposeViewController *emailDialog = [[MFMailComposeViewController alloc] init];
emailDialog.mailComposeDelegate = self;
[emailDialog setSubject:@"My Inline Image Document"];
[emailDialog setMessageBody:emailBody isHTML:YES];
[self presentModalViewController:emailDialog animated:YES];
[emailDialog release];
[emailBody release];
}
I’ve tested this on the iPhone and sent lovely image embedded emails to myself on Yahoo, my personal website, and my MobileMe. I don’t have a Gmail account, but the Yahoo worked perfectly, and every source I’ve found says that the bold-tags are all you need to make it work. Hope this helps all!