REmail

An R package for email data ingestion.

Installation

To install this package from git, you will need to Hadley Wickham's devtools package installed.

install.packages("devtools")
library("devtools")

Now we can install from Github using the following line:

devtools::install_github("matthewjdenny/REmail")

I have had success installing with R 3.2.0+ installed but if you do not have the latest version of R installed, it should work as long as you install the dependencies first with the following block of code:

install.packages( pkgs = c("R.methodsS3","rPython","stringr"), dependencies = TRUE)

Examples

This package only implements a function Read_In_Email() which will extract the To, From, Cc, Date, Subject, and Message fields from an email using Pythons email libraries and handle exceptions if any are missing. This function will return an object of class Email that has the following attributes:

• @from The email address of the sender (if provided) otherwise will simple store the value included in that field (such as "John Smith"
• @to A vector of email address (or strings, handled the same way as the @from field) of recipients included in the "To:" field of the email.
• @CC A vector of email address (or strings, handled the same way as the @from field) of recipients included in the "CC:" field of the email. If the field was left empty in the email, this simply stores "".
• @subject A string containing the plain text of the subject line.
• @subject_tokenized A string vector containing the lowercased plain text of the subject line with all punctuation removed except for "?" and "!".
• @message A string containing the plain text of the message body with newlines and blank lines removed.
• @message_tokenized A string vector containing the lowercased plain text of the message body with all punctuation removed except for "?" and "!".
• @date The date the message was sent in is raw format (will require further parsing) or "" if no date field was included.
• @filename The location of the email file on the user's computer.
• @all_tokens A vector concatenating together the cleaned tokens in @subject_tokenized and @message_tokenized to ease further text processing.
• @num_tokens The count of (cleaned) tokens in the subject and message.
• @num_recipients The total number of email addresses in the "To:" and "CC:" fields in the email.

Here is some example code:

files <- get_file_paths()
My_Email <- Read_In_Email(files[1)

If you instead want to process a collecton of emails to a data.frame, then use the following function:

files <- get_file_paths()
emails <- read_emails(files)

Please let me know if you run into any problems by emailing me at mdenny@psu.edu.