inst/ReadMe.md

In kbroman/mygmailR: Send myself email from R

mygmailR

This is an R package that uses the gmailR package so I can send myself emails and texts.

The gmailR package does all of the work. The only thing the mygmailR package does is handle the private information so that I don't have to include my password or gmail account in scripts.

The default is to have a text file ~/.gmail_private (use chmod 600 or chmod 400 to make it not readable by others) containing the following:

gmail    [e-mail]
password password_for_default_from
text     [e-mail]
to       [e-mail]

That is, two columns with first column being a key (password, gmail, and text) and second column being the corresponding value. The values (e.g. your password) can't include any spaces or single- or double-quotes, I think. The value for text should be an email address that will send a text to your cell phone. To to record is optional: gmail will be used as the “from” account; if to is defined, that will be used as the default “to” account.

Note: You may need an app password for this. Also, it seems like the subject and body of an email can't include single- or double-quotes.

Installation

To install mygmailR, you first need to install a set of packages from CRAN.

pkgs <- c("devtools", "rJava", "rjson", "RCurl", "XML")
for(pkg in pkgs)
    if( !require(pkg, character.only=TRUE) )
        install.packages(pkg)

(The if(!require( )) checks to see if the package is installed; we only install it if it hadn't already been installed.)

Now load the devtools package.

library(devtools)

Now use install_github() to install gmailR and mygmailR.

install_github("trinker/gmailR")
install_github("kbroman/mygmailR")

Usage

I set up a separate Google account just for sending emails and texts from R. And you may need to set up an application-specific password for this, by going to Google → Accounts → Security → App passwords settings.

Create a file in your home directory, ~/.gmail_private that contains your gmail password (password), gmail account (gmail) and an email address that your corresponds to texting to yourself (text). You can include an optional to record.

gmail    [e-mail]
password password_for_default_from
text     [e-mail]
to       [e-mail]

Make this file not readable by others. At the UNIX command line, type

chmod 600 ~/.gmail_private

Then within R, you just need to load mygmailR

library(mygmailR)

and then use send_text() to send yourself a text or send_gmail() to send yourself an email.

send_text("sent from R", "Your R process is done.")

Each of these functions takes arguments subject and body, which should be character strings with no single- or double-quotes. body may be a vector of character strings, in which case they are will be pasted together, separated by newline characters.

send_gmail("sent from R",
           c("Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.",
             "Sed maximus ultrices euismod.",
             "Cras finibus nibh ut sagittis auctor."))

If your ~/.gmail_private file contains a to record, that will be the default email address to send things to. If no to record is defined, the value of gmail will be used as both the “from” and “to” address.

If you want to send to a different email address, use the to argument.

send_gmail("sent from R",
           c("Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.",
             "Sed maximus ultrices euismod.",
             "Cras finibus nibh ut sagittis auctor."),
           to="[e-mail]")

Licensed under the MIT license. (More information here.)

kbroman/mygmailR documentation built on Oct. 22, 2019, 11:17 a.m.