mRpostman: An IMAP Client for R

TL;DR

mRpostman is an R package that implements comprehensive IMAP 4rev1 functionalities, enabling email data retrieval and analysis across various mail providers.

Contribution

It fills a gap in R by providing a versatile IMAP client with extensive features, supporting data analysis from email content.

Findings

Supports most IMAP 4rev1 features

Enables email data analysis in R

Works with virtually any mail provider

Abstract

Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) clients are a common feature in several programming languages. Despite having some packages for electronic messages retrieval, the R language, until recently, lacked a broader solution, capable of coping with different IMAP servers and providing a wide spectrum of features. mRpostman covers most of the IMAP 4rev1 functionalities by implementing tools for message searching, selective fetching of message attributes, mailbox management, attachment extraction, and several other IMAP features that can be executed in virtually any mail provider. By doing so, it enables users to perform data analysis based on e-mail content. The goal of this article is to showcase the toolkit provided with the mRpostman package, to describe its key features and provide some application examples.