How to send an email with attachment from R in windows

Question

I have a scheduled an R script running from a windows machine.

After it finishes, I wish this script to automatically send an email with some log file attached.

Using shell() with some other scripts may be possible, but I was wondering if there is a better solution within R. Thanks.

Answer 1

sendmailR works for me on Windows 7. I referenced http://cran.es.r-project.org/web/packages/sendmailR/sendmailR.pdf

smtpServer= info for Outlook 2010 is in File -> Account Settings -> Account Settings -> double click your account -> text in "Server" box

library(sendmailR)  #set working directory setwd("C:/workingdirectorypath")  #####send plain email  from <- "[email protected]" to <- "[email protected]" subject <- "Email Subject" body <- "Email body."                      mailControl=list(smtpServer="serverinfo")  sendmail(from=from,to=to,subject=subject,msg=body,control=mailControl)  #####send same email with attachment  #needs full path if not in working directory attachmentPath <- "subfolder/log.txt"  #same as attachmentPath if using working directory attachmentName <- "log.txt"  #key part for attachments, put the body and the mime_part in a list for msg attachmentObject <- mime_part(x=attachmentPath,name=attachmentName) bodyWithAttachment <- list(body,attachmentObject)  sendmail(from=from,to=to,subject=subject,msg=bodyWithAttachment,control=mailControl) 

In addition, multiple files can be sent by adding another mime_part to the msg list as follows (I also condensed it):

attachmentObject <- mime_part(x="subfolder/log.txt",name="log.txt") attachmentObject2 <- mime_part(x="subfolder/log2.txt",name="log2.txt") bodyWithAttachment <- list(body,attachmentObject,attachmentObject2) 

Answer 2

Use mailR - it works with authentication, attachments, it automatically send txt message along with html and more.

mailR requires rJava which can be a bit of a pain sometimes. On windows I haven't had any problems. On ubuntu this solved the one issue I've had:

sudo apt-get install openjdk-jdk  

in R

install.packages("devtools", dep = T) library(devtools) install_github("rpremraj/mailR") 

(if you have trouble with rJava - try sudo R CMD javareconf in terminal)

mailR is easy to work with and well documented on the github page.

Example from the documentaion

library(mailR) send.mail(from = "[email protected]",           to = c("[email protected]", "[email protected]"),           subject = "Subject of the email",           body = "Body of the email",           smtp = list(host.name = "smtp.gmail.com", port = 465, user.name = "gmail_username", passwd = "password", ssl = TRUE),           authenticate = TRUE,           send = TRUE,           attach.files = c("./download.log", "upload.log", "https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5031586/How%20to%20use%20the%20Public%20folder.rtf"),           file.names = c("Download log.log", "Upload log.log", "DropBox File.rtf"), # optional parameter           file.descriptions = c("Description for download log", "Description for upload log", "DropBox File"), # optional parameter           debug = TRUE) 

Note: your smtp server might find excessive use suspicious. This is the case with e.g. gmail. So after sending a few mails you probably have to log in to the gmail account and see if the account has been temporarily disabled. Also note that if you use a gmail account with two-factor authentication you need to use an application specific password.