Detect if Message UI content is blank on older OSs

[johnhmeyer123]

I've been using the built in Message UI for a while now to give users the option to send in suggestions / support questions. However, I've always got blank messages from people who for some reason click the support button, and then decide they don't want to send an email. So instead of just hitting "cancel" they just hit "send", and I wind up with that blank email in my inbox.

The reason why I REALLY need a solution now is because one of my apps that has this feature just got into the top 25 of free apps, and I now get a mix of legit emails, but still a bunch of blank emails every hour!

I believe Apple disabled the Send button in iOS 4 if the user did not enter anything, but there are still plenty of people on iOS 3.0.

Any solutions would be great!

[johnhmeyer123]

Or is there away do deal with this on my desktop side? I use Apple Mail with a gmail address for each one of my apps. Maybe there's a way to detect that the message content is nothing, but ignores the signature, and then email them back automatically! I messed around with Mail's rule preferences but couldn't find a solution that worked around the user's signatures.

[musicwind95]

Originally Posted by johnhmeyer123

Or is there away do deal with this on my desktop side? I use Apple Mail with a gmail address for each one of my apps. Maybe there's a way to detect that the message content is nothing, but ignores the signature, and then email them back automatically! I messed around with Mail's rule preferences but couldn't find a solution that worked around the user's signatures.

I'm not sure what you mean by signature, but two things you could try:

Create a filter of "Message Content" "Does Not Contain" "e"
Because e is in pretty much anything and everything

Create a filter of "Message Content" "Is Equal To" " "
Leave it blank to filter out blank messages; not sure if this works.

See screenshot:
http://img.skitch.com/20100904-kh1p9...n7m3u3s8qp.png

[johnhmeyer123]

Originally Posted by musicwind95

I'm not sure what you mean by signature, but two things you could try:

Create a filter of "Message Content" "Does Not Contain" "e"
Because e is in pretty much anything and everything

Create a filter of "Message Content" "Is Equal To" " "
Leave it blank to filter out blank messages; not sure if this works.

See screenshot:
http://img.skitch.com/20100904-kh1p9...n7m3u3s8qp.png

Thanks..By signature, I meant "Sent from my iPhone" or something like that which is automatically added.

[musicwind95]

By default, it should add the signature, right? Then I believe there's an option of "Exactly" under the "Message Content" section, as in "Message Content" "Is Exactly", then fill in "Sent From My iPhone." That should eliminate most messages...although I'm not sure about this; maybe you should simply move these messages to a folder first, before you commit to deleting them.