Sending email via Gmail app directly (no chooser intent)

Pavitra Golchha • Published onNov 11, 2023

You are probably here because you want to let your users send email via the Gmail app directly. You also do not want to launch a disambiguation dialog. You are also tired of finding ways to do so that works in 2023. If that’s all true, you are in the right place.

In the AndroidManifest.xml file, specify the package name for the Gmail app, which is com.google.android.gm.

<queries>
	<package android:name="com.google.android.gm" />
</queries>

Without this, you would get an error like this in Logcat:

Unable to find explicit activity class {component name}; have you declared this activity in your AndroidManifest.xml, or does your intent not match its declared ?

After that, you can create an explicit intent with the ComposeActivityGmailExternal activity that is exported by the Gmail app.

fun Context.sendEmail(email: String, subject: String, body: String) {
    val intent = Intent(Intent.ACTION_SENDTO)
        .setData(
            Uri.parse("mailto:$email?subject=${Uri.encode(subject)}&body=${Uri.encode(body)}")
        )
        .setClassName(
            "com.google.android.gm",
            "com.google.android.gm.ComposeActivityGmailExternal"
        )
    startActivity(intent)
}

For some reason, this activity app does not support the Intent extras such as EXTRA_TEXT, which is the reason why we have to construct the Uri from String instead.

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