How to send HTML email using R

Question

I have searched SO and well as google and cannot seem to find a solution to my problem. I am trying to send a HTML formatted email within R using sendmailR package. The plain text email works just fine, but then am unable to switch from plain text to HTML.

My code:

require(sendmailR)
from <- "alertbot@companyname.com"
message = "<HTML><body><b>Hello</b></body></HTML>"
to = c("me@companyname.com")
subject = "Test Monitor Alert"

sendmail(from, to, subject, msg = msg,control=list(smtpServer="smtp-gw1.wal-mart.com"),headers=list("Content-Type"="text/html; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed"))

I do get the email, but its in plain text and the email body contains the message as is instead of the HTML formatted text. Please help.

score 15 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:16

15

This is possible, cf https://stackoverflow.com/a/21930556/448145 Just add:

msg <- mime_part(message)
msg[["headers"]][["Content-Type"]] <- "text/html"
sendmail(from, to, subject, msg = msg, ...)

edited May 23 '17 at 12:16

Community

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answered Feb 24 '14 at 16:23

Karl Forner

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score 6 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:48

6

sendmailR cannot do this because it is hard-coded to send the message part out as text. If you look at the packages source, line 38 of sendmail.R is the following:

writeLines("Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed\r\n", sock, sep="\r\n")

Change that to

writeLines("Content-Type: text/html; format=flowed\r\n", sock, sep="\r\n")

like you tried to do through the options and it will work.

Update: sendmailR now allows html emails (see Karl's answer below and https://stackoverflow.com/a/21930556/448145).

edited May 23 '17 at 11:48

Community

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answered Nov 07 '13 at 19:58

Christopher Louden

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Wow I was not aware that its hard coded. Do you know of another package that might allow this. I am not comfortable with changing the source of the package itself. – Rohit Das Nov 07 '13 at 20:32
I up-voted this, but it seems that sendmail.R has changed since you wrote it – JayCo Mar 09 '14 at 20:00

score 4 · Answer 3 · answered May 15 '14 at 07:49

With the mailR package (https://github.com/rpremraj/mailR), you could send HTML emails with ease as below:

send.mail(from = "sender@gmail.com",
          to = c("recipient1@gmail.com", "recipient2@gmail.com"),
          subject = "Subject of the email",
          body = "<html>The apache logo - <img src=\"http://www.apache.org/images/asf_logo_wide.gif\"></html>",
          html = TRUE,
          smtp = list(host.name = "smtp.gmail.com", port = 465, user.name = "gmail_username", passwd = "password", ssl = TRUE),
          attach.files = c("./download.log", "upload.log"),
          authenticate = TRUE,
          send = TRUE)

score 3 · Answer 4 · answered Nov 07 '13 at 20:10

I prefer to use a specialized Mail agent for this type of task than using an R package. You can for example use Mutt. Available for linux and windows.

Here I am using option -e to send a command:

writeLines(message,
           p<-pipe(paste('mutt -e ','"set content_type=text/html"',
                          from,to,' -s ', subject))
close(p)

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Nov 07 '13 at 19:56

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If nothing else, you can post the html to a php page, and have php send the html email. We'll see if anyone else has a better solutions.

answered Nov 07 '13 at 19:56

AwokeKnowing

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This is more of a comment than an answer. – Thomas Nov 07 '13 at 20:05
yeah pretty close. but if the source hadn't been editable, it would actually be the (a) solution. – AwokeKnowing Nov 07 '13 at 20:11
I am not familiar with php and I am using a windows VM. I will keep this in mind but will try the other options first. Thanks. – Rohit Das Nov 07 '13 at 20:33

How to send HTML email using R

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