How to embed an image in the HTML body of an email in iOS

Question

I'm trying to include an image in the body of an HTML email sent from an iPad. It seems impossible. I have tried to use the CID approach, but it seems that in iOS it is not possible to get/set the CID of attachments.

I've also tried to embed the image with src="data:image/png;base64, blahblahblah". When you compose the mail it seems to work, but nothing appears when the mail is received.

Any ideas?

More Detail: We are not looking for a solution where the JPEG/PNG is attached at the bottom of an email. That's easy to do with [composer addAttachmentData:mimeType:fileName:].

We are looking for a solution where the image is embedded inline in an HTML-formatted email. You could wrap a link around that IMG tag, so that when the recipient clicks the IMG, he/she will be linked out to the app's iTunes page.

Sinuous

Same problem here. Did you get the cid? How? Thanks. – Conversable

I posted a blog on how to do this here: blog.tinymission.com/blog/blogengine.web/post/2011/12/29/… – Codi

do you only want to send an image or also somw thext? May e this post can help #2534717 – Azar

@Sinuous Do you solved your problem? Please tell me how! I want to make that feature too in my app. Thank you! – Kasandrakasevich

More or less. Look my answer below! – Sinuous

Answer 1

Download the NSData+base64 category from github.

Then do the following:

NSData *imageData = [NSData dataWithContentsOfFile:pathInDocumentDirectory(imagePath)];
NSString *base64String = [imageData base64EncodedString];
NSString *imageString = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"data:image/png;base64,%@", base64String];

Finally, put the imageString in the HTML body where you want this image to appear.

Hope it helps!

Sinuous

This is very close, but doesn't quite work, because some web clients like GMail do not render img tags with data URIs. :-( I have tested with a tiny red dot PNG as a data URI, and the image showed up fine in the iPad mail client, and in Yahoo mail, but it failed in GMail (even though an inspection of the raw email shows that the base64 string is present). – Bachelorism

The best that I could do was have my IMG tag point to a PNG that I host on an external website. But that is not a great solution either, as many web clients will block external images by default. In any case, this base64 solution is pretty close, so I'm happy to award the bounty. :-) – Bachelorism

Unfortunately, Gmail web cannot interpret it :/ – Hannah

Answer 2

From iphone email attachment

MFMailComposeViewController *picker = [[MFMailComposeViewController alloc] init];
picker.mailComposeDelegate = self;

[picker setSubject:@"Hello"];


// Set up recipients
NSArray *toRecipients = [NSArray arrayWithObject:@"[email protected]"]; 
NSArray *ccRecipients = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:@"[email protected]",           @"[email protected]", nil]; 
NSArray *bccRecipients = [NSArray arrayWithObject:@"[email protected]"]; 

[picker setToRecipients:toRecipients];
[picker setCcRecipients:ccRecipients];  
[picker setBccRecipients:bccRecipients];

// Attach an image to the email
NSString *path = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"rainy" ofType:@"png"];
NSData *myData = [NSData dataWithContentsOfFile:path];
[picker addAttachmentData:myData mimeType:@"image/png" fileName:@"rainy"];

// Fill out the email body text
NSString *emailBody = @"It is raining";
[picker setMessageBody:emailBody isHTML:NO];

[self presentModalViewController:picker animated:YES];
[picker release];  

Tamboura

Answer 3

To show image in gmail, you do:

MFMailComposeViewController *mailCont = [[MFMailComposeViewController alloc] init];
    mailCont.mailComposeDelegate = self; 

    NSMutableString *emailBody = [[NSMutableString alloc] initWithCapacity:20];

    NSString *linkimg = @"https://idrivethru.com/iDriveThruWeb/faces/javax.faces.resource/idrivethru_logo.png?ln=images";

    //Add the image
    [emailBody appendFormat:@"<p><a href = 'https://idrivethru.com/'> <img src='%@' align='centre' alt='iDriveThru.com'> </a></p><br/>", linkimg];

    [emailBody appendString:@"<p>This is an email with an embeded image right <b>above</b> this text</p>"];

    //NSLog(@"%@",emailBody);

    [mailCont setMessageBody:emailBody isHTML:YES];
    [self presentViewController:mailCont animated:YES completion:nil];

Hydrant