How to open Email program via Intents (but only an Email program)

Thanks to Pentium10's suggestion of searching how Linkify works, I have found a great solution to this problem. Basically, you just create a "mailto:" link, and then call the appropriate Intent for that.:

Intent intent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_VIEW);
Uri data = Uri.parse("mailto:?subject=" + subject + "&body=" + body);
intent.setData(data);
startActivity(intent);

There are a few interesting aspects to this solution:

1. I'm using the ACTION_VIEW action because that's more appropriate for a "mailto:" link. You could provide no particular action, but then you might get some unsatisfactory results (for example, it will ask you if you want to add the link to your contacts).

2. Since this is a "share" link, I am simply including no email address - even though this is a mailto link. It works.

3. There's no chooser involved. The reason for this is to let the user take advantage of defaults; if they have set a default email program, then it'll take them straight to that, bypassing the chooser altogether (which seems good in my mind, you may argue otherwise).

Of course there's a lot of finesse I'm leaving out (such as properly encoding the subject/body), but you should be able to figure that out on your own.

Changing the MIME type is the answer, this is what I did in my app to change the same behavior. I used intent.setType("message/rfc822");

This worked for me

Intent emailIntent = new Intent(android.content.Intent.ACTION_SEND);
emailIntent.setFlags(Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_NEW_TASK);
emailIntent.setType("vnd.android.cursor.item/email");
emailIntent.putExtra(android.content.Intent.EXTRA_EMAIL, new String[] {"[email protected]"});
emailIntent.putExtra(android.content.Intent.EXTRA_SUBJECT, "My Email Subject");
emailIntent.putExtra(android.content.Intent.EXTRA_TEXT, "My email content");
startActivity(Intent.createChooser(emailIntent, "Send mail using..."));