Arpith Siromoney 💬

Email subjects — why bother?

A few days ago I explained how Constellational, the app I’m building to sharing notes, lets you share your posts via email if it’s a draft or an edit you’re working on. Today I found out that React Native now supports subject lines when sharing through email.

This is something I’ve wanted for a while, because an email without a subject is an email that’s not going to get read. You know how many emails are lying unopened in your inbox.

The change I had to make to my app’s code was tiny:

var username = SettingStore.getUsername();
var post = this.props.post;
var url = URL + '/' + username + '/' + post.id;
var options = {subject: post.data.split('\n')[0]};
if (post.isDraft || post.hasUnpublishedEdits) {
 options.message = post.data;
} else {
 options.url = url;
}
ActionSheetIOS.showShareActionSheetWithOptions(options, this.shareFailure, this.shareSuccess);

Note that I’m taking the first line of the post as the email’s subject, perhaps this should be trimmed. This fixes #39.

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