Question

Is it possible to programatically embed an image in the body of an email sent by the Mail app in Android?

Can I use the ACTION_SEND intent to do this, or should I compose the email myself?

Answer 1

to put the image in the body, you need to set the content type to “text/html” and then put an img tag in the email body. if you don’t want to use a webserver to host the image, then you can use a data uri for the image.

Info & Sample:

<img src="data:image/png;base64,
iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs+9AAAABGdBTUEAALGP
C/xhBQAAAAlwSFlzAAALEwAACxMBAJqcGAAAAAd0SU1FB9YGARc5KB0XV+IA
AAAddEVYdENvbW1lbnQAQ3JlYXRlZCB3aXRoIFRoZSBHSU1Q72QlbgAAAF1J
REFUGNO9zL0NglAAxPEfdLTs4BZM4DIO4C7OwQg2JoQ9LE1exdlYvBBeZ7jq
ch9//q1uH4TLzw4d6+ErXMMcXuHWxId3KOETnnXXV6MJpcq2MLaI97CER3N0
vr4MkhoXe0rZigAAAABJRU5ErkJggg==" alt="Red dot" />

If you want to attach an image to the email, you use the putExtra method and set it to EXTRA_STREAM.

emailIntent.putExtra(android.content.Intent.EXTRA_STREAM, myImageStream);