Use Cordova to Initiate an Email

Since your Cordova app runs in an HTML Layout Engine, there’s a very straight-forward way to initiate an email: a link.

However, if you want to create a nicely formatted email, or a longer one, you need to use a plugin to invoke the native interface. I went with katzer’s cordova-plugin-email-composer, and it works well.

My purpose was to simply create a blank email draft, with only title and content.

The following code wrapper encapsulates the plugin call, taking into account:

• we’re running on a device with email not installed
• we’re running on a non-mobile device (as I often do when debugging the app)

function draftEmail(subject, message) {
    if (!window.plugin){
        //non-mobile - plugins are not present.
        alert("Email plugin is not available");  
        return;
    }
    if (!isAvailable){
        //mobile, but no email installed
        alert("Email is not available")
        return;
    }
    window.plugin.email.open({
        to: [], cc: [], bcc: [], attachments: [],
        subject: subject,
        body: message,
        isHtml: true
    });
}

//runs on application startup, to check for installed email
var isAvailable = false;
if (window.plugin){
    window.plugin.email.isServiceAvailable(
        function (emailInstalled) {
            isAvailable = emailInstalled;
        }
    );
}

It would be more elegant to hide the “Share” button if email is not installed on the device, but for demo purposes this works.