Gmail 5.0 app fails with “Permission denied for the attachment” when it receives ACTION_SEND intent

Question

My app creates mails with attachments, and uses an intent with Intent.ACTION_SEND to launch a mail app.

It works with all the mail apps I tested with, e

Answer 1

You should implement a FileProvider, which can create Uris for your app's internal files. Other apps are granted permission to read these Uris. Then, simply instead of calling Uri.fromFile(attachment), you instantiate your FileProvider and use:

fileProvider.getUriForFile(attachment);

Answer 2

GMail 5.0 added some security checks to attachments it receives from an Intent. These are unrelated to unix permissions, so the fact that the file is readable doesn't matter.

When the attachment Uri is a file://, it'll only accept files from external storage, the private directory of gmail itself, or world-readable files from the private data directory of the calling app.

The problem with this security check is that it relies on gmail being able to find the caller app, which is only reliable when the caller has asked for result. In your code above, you do not ask for result and therefore gmail does not know who the caller is, and rejects your file.

Since it worked for you in 4.9 but not in 5.0, you know it's not a unix permission problem, so the reason must be the new checks.

TL;DR answer: replace startActivity with startActivityForResult.

Or better yet, use a content provider.

Answer 3

Not sure why GMail 5.0 doesn't like certain file paths (which I've confirmed it does have read access to), but an apparently better solution is to implement your own ContentProvider class to serve the file. It's actually somewhat simple, and I found a decent example here: http://stephendnicholas.com/archives/974

Be sure to add the tag to your app manifest, and include a "android:grantUriPermissions="true"" within that. You'll also want to implement getType() and return the appropriate MIME type for the file URI, otherwise some apps wont work with this... There's an example of that in the comment section on the link.

Answer 4

Use getExternalCacheDir() with File.createTempFile.

Use the following to create a temporary file in the external cache directory:

File tempFile = File.createTempFile("fileName", ".txt", context.getExternalCacheDir());

---

Then copy your original file's content to tempFile,

FileWriter fw = new FileWriter(tempFile);

FileReader fr = new FileReader(Data.ERR_BAK_FILE);
int c = fr.read();
while (c != -1) {
    fw.write(c);
    c = fr.read();
}
fr.close();

fw.flush();
fw.close();

---

now put your file to intent,

emailIntent.putExtra(Intent.EXTRA_STREAM, Uri.fromFile(tempFile));

Answer 5

I was having this problem and finally found an easy way to send email with attachment. Here is the code

public void SendEmail(){
    try {

        //saving image
        String randomNameOfPic = Calendar.DAY_OF_YEAR+DateFormat.getTimeInstance().toString();
        File file = new File(ActivityRecharge.this.getCacheDir(), "slip"+  randomNameOfPic+ ".jpg");
        FileOutputStream fOut = new FileOutputStream(file);
        myPic.compress(Bitmap.CompressFormat.JPEG, 100, fOut);
        fOut.flush();
        fOut.close();
        file.setReadable(true, false);

        //sending email
        Intent intent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_SEND);
        intent.setType("text/plain");
        intent.putExtra(Intent.EXTRA_EMAIL, new String[]{"zohabali5@gmail.com"});
        intent.putExtra(Intent.EXTRA_SUBJECT, "Recharge Account");
        intent.putExtra(Intent.EXTRA_TEXT, "body text");

        //Uri uri = Uri.parse("file://" + fileAbsolutePath);
        intent.putExtra(Intent.EXTRA_STREAM, Uri.fromFile(file));
        intent.addFlags(Intent.FLAG_GRANT_READ_URI_PERMISSION);
        startActivityForResult(Intent.createChooser(intent, "Send email..."),12);
    }catch (Exception e){
        Toast.makeText(ActivityRecharge.this,"Unable to open Email intent",Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show();
    }
}

In this code "myPic" is bitmap which was returned by camera intent

Answer 6

I tested it and I found out that it was definitely private storage access problem. When you attach some file to Gmail (over 5.0) do not use the file from private storage such as /data/data/package/. Try to use /storage/sdcard.

You can successfully attach your file.