ingest_maildir: Ingest a Local Maildir into an IMAP Folder
In mRpostman: An IMAP Client for R

ingest_maildir

R Documentation

Ingest a Local Maildir into an IMAP Folder

Description

Uploads every message file found under a local directory to a folder on the connected IMAP server, using the package's own APPEND implementation (ImapCon$append_msg()). Message files are read as raw bytes and appended verbatim, so any RFC 5322-conformant maildir-style layout (one message per file) can be ingested – mail server backups, exported archives, or public corpora such as the Enron corpus (see enron_sandbox).

Usage

ingest_maildir(
  con,
  path = NULL,
  folder = basename(path),
  create = TRUE,
  recursive = TRUE,
  files = NULL,
  mute = FALSE,
  retries = 1
)

Arguments

`con`	An `ImapCon` object, as returned by `configure_imap`.
`path`	A string with the path to a local directory containing message files.
`folder`	A string with the name of the destination folder on the server. Default is `basename(path)`.
`create`	A `logical`. If `TRUE` (default), the destination folder is created with `CREATE` when it does not exist yet.
`recursive`	A `logical`. If `TRUE` (default), message files are searched recursively under `path`.
`files`	An optional character vector of message file paths to ingest, overriding the directory listing. When provided, `path` and `recursive` are ignored for file discovery (a subset selected by the caller – see `enron_sandbox` – is uploaded as given). Default is `NULL`.
`mute`	A `logical`. If `FALSE`, prints progress every 500 messages and a final summary. Default is `FALSE`.
`retries`	Number of attempts for each `APPEND`. Default is `1`.

Details

APPEND via libcurl stores messages with the \Seen flag and the current internal date (see populate_sandbox for the implications); header-based SENT* searches are therefore the appropriate way to query ingested corpora by date. Files that fail to upload (e.g., malformed messages rejected by the server) are skipped with a warning rather than aborting the ingestion.

Value

Invisibly, a data.frame with one row per message file: path, size, and appended (a logical indicating whether the upload succeeded).

Examples

## Not run: 
con <- configure_imap(url = "imap://localhost:1430",
                      username = "testuser", password = "sandbox",
                      use_ssl = FALSE)
# upload a locally stored maildir folder to the server
manifest <- ingest_maildir(con, path = "~/backup/maildir/archive2020",
                           folder = "archive2020")
table(manifest$appended)

## End(Not run)

mRpostman documentation built on July 28, 2026, 9:08 a.m.