How to get the Android device's primary e-mail address

Question

How do you get the Android's primary e-mail address (or a list of e-mail addresses)?

It's my understanding that on OS 2.0+ there's support for multiple e-mail addresses, but below 2.0 you can only have one e-mail address per device.

Answer 1

There are several ways to do this, shown below.

As a friendly warning, be careful and up-front to the user when dealing with account, profile, and contact data. If you misuse a user's email address or other personal information, bad things can happen.

Method A: Use AccountManager (API level 5+)

You can use AccountManager.getAccounts or AccountManager.getAccountsByType to get a list of all account names on the device. Fortunately, for certain account types (including com.google), the account names are email addresses. Example snippet below.

Pattern emailPattern = Patterns.EMAIL_ADDRESS; // API level 8+ Account[] accounts = AccountManager.get(context).getAccounts(); for (Account account : accounts) {     if (emailPattern.matcher(account.name).matches()) {         String possibleEmail = account.name;         ...     } } 

Note that this requires the GET_ACCOUNTS permission:

<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.GET_ACCOUNTS" /> 

More on using AccountManager can be found at the Contact Manager sample code in the SDK.

Method B: Use ContactsContract.Profile (API level 14+)

As of Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich), you can get the user's email addresses by accessing their profile. Accessing the user profile is a bit heavyweight as it requires two permissions (more on that below), but email addresses are fairly sensitive pieces of data, so this is the price of admission.

Below is a full example that uses a CursorLoader to retrieve profile data rows containing email addresses.

public class ExampleActivity extends Activity implements LoaderManager.LoaderCallbacks<Cursor> {     public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {         super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);         setContentView(R.layout.activity_main);         getLoaderManager().initLoader(0, null, this);     }      @Override     public Loader<Cursor> onCreateLoader(int id, Bundle arguments) {         return new CursorLoader(this,                 // Retrieve data rows for the device user's 'profile' contact.                 Uri.withAppendedPath(                         ContactsContract.Profile.CONTENT_URI,                         ContactsContract.Contacts.Data.CONTENT_DIRECTORY),                 ProfileQuery.PROJECTION,                  // Select only email addresses.                 ContactsContract.Contacts.Data.MIMETYPE + " = ?",                 new String[]{ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds.Email.CONTENT_ITEM_TYPE},                  // Show primary email addresses first. Note that there won't be                 // a primary email address if the user hasn't specified one.                 ContactsContract.Contacts.Data.IS_PRIMARY + " DESC");     }      @Override     public void onLoadFinished(Loader<Cursor> cursorLoader, Cursor cursor) {         List<String> emails = new ArrayList<String>();         cursor.moveToFirst();         while (!cursor.isAfterLast()) {             emails.add(cursor.getString(ProfileQuery.ADDRESS));             // Potentially filter on ProfileQuery.IS_PRIMARY             cursor.moveToNext();         }          ...     }      @Override     public void onLoaderReset(Loader<Cursor> cursorLoader) {     }      private interface ProfileQuery {         String[] PROJECTION = {                 ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds.Email.ADDRESS,                 ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds.Email.IS_PRIMARY,         };          int ADDRESS = 0;         int IS_PRIMARY = 1;     } } 

This requires both the READ_PROFILE and READ_CONTACTS permissions:

<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.READ_PROFILE" /> <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.READ_CONTACTS" /> 

Answer 2

This could be useful to others:

Using AccountPicker to get user's email address without any global permissions, and allowing the user to be aware and authorize or cancel the process.