How to send a mail from your Windows Phone 8.1 app

The old way

Sometimes, we need to pass some values to a newly generated E-Mail. In Windows Phone, we always had the EmailComposeTask for that:

EmailComposeTask mailTask = new EmailComposeTask();
mailTask .To = "mail@domain.com";
mailTask .Subject = "this is the Subject";
mailTask.Body = "this is the Body";

mailTask.Show();

This way was pretty straight forward. It will work in a Windows Phone 8.1 Silverlight app, but not in a WINPRT app.

The new way

I looked around and found the EmailManager class, which is also pretty easy to use. Let’s go through the code. First, we need to declare the EmailRecipient(s):

EmailRecipient sendTo = new EmailRecipient()
{
    Address = "mail@domain.com"
};

After that, we are now able to set up our EmailMessage, which works in a similar way like the old EmailComposeTask:

EmailMessage mail = new EmailMessage();
mail.Subject = "this is the Subject";
mail.Body = "this is the Body";

After setting up the Subject and the Body, we need to add our recipients to the EMailMessage. This is the only way to add “To”, “Bcc” and “CC” objects to our EMailMessage:

mail.To.Add(sendTo);
//mail.Bcc.Add(sendTo);
//mail.CC.Add(sendTo);

Last but not least, we are calling the  ShowComposeNewEmailAsync() method of the EmailManager class, which will open the Share contract with mail only:

await EmailManager.ShowComposeNewEmailAsync(mail);

 

wp_ss_20140424_0002

Here is once again the complete code for you to copy:

//predefine Recipient
EmailRecipient sendTo = new EmailRecipient()
{
    Address = "mail@domain.com"
};

//generate mail object
EmailMessage mail = new EmailMessage();
mail.Subject = "this is the Subject";
mail.Body = "this is the Body";

//add recipients to the mail object
mail.To.Add(sendTo);
//mail.Bcc.Add(sendTo);
//mail.CC.Add(sendTo);

//open the share contract with Mail only:
await EmailManager.ShowComposeNewEmailAsync(mail);

The new way works for both Windows Phone 8.1 Runtime and Silverlight apps.

The dirty way:

I found also another way that works with an Uri including the values as parameters launched by LaunchUriAsync() that gets recognized by the OS:

var mail = new Uri("mailto:?to=tickets@msiccdev.uservoice.com&subject=this is the Subject&body=this is the Body");
await Launcher.LaunchUriAsync(mail);

The parameters get automatically parsed by the Mail app.

I’ll leave it up to you which way you are using.

As always, I hope this is helpful for some of you.

Happy coding!

Comments 2
    1. You have to convert your attachement into a byte stream. I will test that and update my post.

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