populate_sandbox: Populate a Mailbox with the Synthetic Sandbox Corpus

In mRpostman: An IMAP Client for R

Populate a Mailbox with the Synthetic Sandbox Corpus

Description

Stores the deterministic corpus generated by sandbox_corpus in a mailbox, using the package's own IMAP operations: each message is uploaded with APPEND (ImapCon$append_msg()), a secondary folder is created with CREATE, and flags are set with STORE. It is meant to be run against the disposable local Docker IMAP server shipped in system.file("docker", package = "mRpostman") — see the "A reproducible IMAP sandbox with Docker" vignette — but works against any IMAP account (mind your provider's rate limits).

Usage

populate_sandbox(
  con,
  n = 200,
  seed = 3501,
  extra_folder = "ProjectAtlas",
  mute = FALSE
)

Arguments

con	An ImapCon object, as returned by configure_imap.
n	Number of messages to append to INBOX. Default is 200.
seed	An integer used as the RNG seed for sandbox_corpus. Default is 3501, after RFC 3501.
extra_folder	A string with the name of a secondary folder to be created and populated with every 10th message (for folder, COPY, and MOVE demonstrations), or NULL to skip it. Default is "ProjectAtlas".
mute	A logical. If FALSE, prints progress and a final summary. Default is FALSE.

Details

APPEND via libcurl stores messages with the \Seen flag (hardcoded in libcurl's IMAP module) and the current internal date, so flags are adjusted afterwards with ImapCon$add_flags() and ImapCon$remove_flags(). Internal-date searches (BEFORE/SINCE/ON, WITHIN) therefore only make sense relative to the population time; searches on fixed dates should use the SENT* variants, which read the Date: header — spread over the year 2020 in this corpus.

Value

Invisibly, the info data.frame of the generated corpus (see sandbox_corpus).

See Also

Other sandbox: enron_sandbox(), ingest_maildir(), sandbox_corpus()

Examples

## Not run: 
# against the local Docker sandbox (see the vignette):
con <- configure_imap(url = "imap://localhost:1430",
                      username = "testuser",
                      password = "sandbox",
                      use_ssl = FALSE)
info <- populate_sandbox(con, n = 200)

## End(Not run)

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