Question

i wonder what is the best solution to send an email from my app.

I have two solutions :
1- using MFMailComposeViewController :
it works well. Easy to use. but use an huge amount of RAM : in activity monitor, when i use this, the RAM allocation grows from ~10 Mo to ~20Mo, and is never freed
2- Setup a PHP-Script that handles sending email.
it works very well too. And it uses very few RAM : around ~3 Mo with this solution.

So, my question is :
does this is allowed by apple ?

Does anyone is using this solution in his app ?

Answer 1

I’m pretty sure apple doesn’t care how some email gets sent out when people use your app.

The more important issue is that when sending from the device, using MFMailComposeViewController, you get the following for free:

• users see a familiar interface
• users send their mail from their own account
• users have messages in their sent folder
• users can choose to archive a message

Using your own php script, you get:

• a lot of extra work to do, and stuff to maintain
• either A) always the same sender address (from your script), or B) an address that the user must type in (afaik there is no legal way to get an email address from iOS)
• in case B), trying to send on behalf of the user, you will run into spam filters quickly (think about SPF and such)

Looking at these things, the proposed solutions are really not comparable. So the real question is, what kind of email is sent out. Is it feedback sent to you, or is it mail sent on behalf of the user?

The memory concerns are new to me, I never experienced such problems. Do you handle memory management the proper way? If so, there is nothing to worry about. Don’t focus too much on the “activity monitor” if you’re not actually experiencing problems.