Sending Email From R

When I am am working in Sql Server and need to send an email I use “sp_send_dbmail“. So when I am working in R, I didn’t know how to send an email. I often use this as notification that a process has finished. It also works nicely as a text to your cell phone. I had one additional reason why I wanted to be able to email from R. I wanted to send an email to my evernote account with just a few key strokes. The goal was to accomplish this by writing a simple wrapper function. Below is the solution that I came up with. It works, but there are serious security implications. I offer this merely as a proof of concept. Hopefully someone can show me a better way to handle passing your email password to the R function.

# install.packages("mailR")
library(mailR)
en <- function(s="Message From R",tags="#todo",b=" ",r = c("myevernoteaddress@m.evernote.com")){
    sender <- "myemail@mydomain.com"
    password <- readLines("pathtopassword/password.txt")
    if(r=="me") r <- "myemail@mydomain.com"
    send.mail(
        from = sender,
        to = r,
        subject=paste(s,tags),
        body =b,
        smtp = list(host.name = "mail.mydomain.com", port = 465, user.name = sender, passwd = password, ssl = TRUE),
        authenticate = TRUE,
        send = TRUE
        )
}

I often have an R terminal open, so when I have a great idea for a research project I can add a note to my evernote account simply. For instance:

en(s="Read up on current imputation methods",tags="#Research")

Then a new entry is added for me in evernote with the tag ‘Research’. ( I have noticed that the tagging seems to only work if the tag previously exists in my evernote account.)  Often I have a task that just needs done that I don’t want to forget about. I can issue a quick command and then I will have a record of it.

en(s="email adviser about research")

That is all I need to do and the note is added to my account. I have found this to be quite useful and hopefully you will as well.