Email Composer on iOS

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It’s often needed to add email sending functionality to iOS apps. In order to do that, there is a specific view controller to use called MFMailComposeViewController. When presented, it brings up the familiar system controller to compose and send an email. It’s possible to provide default values before its presentation, such as the subject or the recipients, even a predefined email body. In overall, sending email is a quite standard procedure, and this post will take you through the integration steps of the email composer on iOS.

Initial steps

The first step towards presenting the system controller to compose and send emails, is to import a specific framework that will make the MFMailComposeViewController class available. That is the MessageUI:

import MessageUI

After that, it’s mandatory to check if the device can actually send emails! If we skip that and the device is unable to send emails for some reason, then the app will just crash; that’s something we don’t want to happen by any means.

Doing that check is easy, and all it takes is to call a class method in MFMailComposeViewController:

func composeEmail() {
    guard MFMailComposeViewController.canSendMail() else {
        let alert = UIAlertController(title: "Send email", message: "This…