How to send an email with attachment from R in windows

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.

Solution 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)

Solution 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.

Solution 3:

Would you settle for a twitter message? You could use Rcurl to post an update to twitter, which can then be forwarded to your cell phone as a text, or to your email via the notification settings.

See here: http://www.sakana.fr/blog/2007/03/18/scripting-twitter-with-curl/

Solution 4:

Have you looked into the sendmailR package yet? It allows SMTP to submit a message and you could probably edit the function to allow an attachment. Then again, if its only one log file it might just be worth it to use shell() as you mentioned.