Email body as attachment

[aghaynes]

Hi,

I've been using your package for a while to send emails with HTML body and PDF attachments for a while now. I updated R last week and found that the body is now sent as an attachment too...

I assume that somewhen recently the disposition argument to mime_part has stopped working correctly?

This is essentially the code i've been using...

sendmailR::sendmail(from = address,
                      to = recipient,
                      subject = subject,
                      msg = list(sendmailR::mime_part(emailbody,
                                                      type = "text/html",
                                                      disposition="inline"),
                                 sendmailR::mime_part(pdfoutfile,
                                                      name = pdf_name)),
                      control = smtp_settings)

[aghaynes]

Some additional info for you...

I rolled back the version of sendmailR that i'm using. Version 1.3-1 behaves as I expect (the body of the email is indeed the body), while the two newer versions (1.3-2 and the current 1.4-0) both include the body as an attachment. Maybe that gives a clue as to what wrong. It at least narrows it down to something that changed within the last 12 ca months.

[ndevln]

Hi,

around this time, there were some UTF-8 compatibility updates for Outlook.

I am not sure why this happens and it depends on the length and type of emailbody. Could you test if the new mime_part_html() function fixes your problem? This function overwrites the file attachment behavior.

[aghaynes]

Just to clarify, you mean this?

sendmailR::sendmail(from = address,
                      to = recipient,
                      subject = subject,
                      msg = list(sendmailR::mime_part_html(emailbody),
                                 sendmailR::mime_part(pdfoutfile,
                                                      name = pdf_name)),
                      control = smtp_settings)

Yes, I can try that out tomorrow.

[ndevln]

But if you provide more details or a working example for emailbody, I can try to find out, why this text is wrongly classified as an attachment.

[aghaynes]

I'll see if i can do one tomorrow... I can't share the actual emails...

[aghaynes]

Using mime_part_html works - the email body is indeed displayed as the body. Thanks for the tip! :)

The body that is wrongly included as an attachment with mime_part is an Rmd compiled to html. I tried with the default template one from RStudio and that is also treated as an attachment (github wont let me share the compiled html, so here's the Rmd code).

---
title: "Untitled"
author: "Author"
date: "2022-11-29"
output: html_document
---

```{r setup, include=FALSE}
knitr::opts_chunk$set(echo = TRUE)
```

## R Markdown

This is an R Markdown document. Markdown is a simple formatting syntax for authoring HTML, PDF, and MS Word documents. For more details on using R Markdown see <http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com>.

When you click the **Knit** button a document will be generated that includes both content as well as the output of any embedded R code chunks within the document. You can embed an R code chunk like this:

```{r cars}
#| result: hide
summary(cars)
```

## Including Plots

You can also embed plots, for example:

```{r pressure, echo=FALSE}
plot(pressure)
```

Note that the `echo = FALSE` parameter was added to the code chunk to prevent printing of the R code that generated the plot.

[chrisumphlett]

I'm having the opposite problem -- the attachment is being written to the body, and results in this overflow error:

## I have from, to, subject, attachmentname defined elsewhere
data(iris)
vroom::vroom_write(iris, file = attachmentName, delim = ",")
subject <- "Hello from R"
body <- list(mime_part("It works!"), mime_part(x=attachmentName))
sendmail(from, to, subject, body,
         control=list(smtpServer="corpsmtp.techsmith.com"))

Error in wait_for(250) : 
  SMTP Error: maximum allowed line length is 998 octets, got 5093

cars because it's smaller works (no error, the email sends). but it puts it in the body and is unintelligible

vroom::vroom_write(cars, file = attachmentName, delim = ",")
subject <- "Hello from R"
body <- list(mime_part("It works!"), mime_part(x=attachmentName))
sendmail(from, to, subject, body,
         control=list(smtpServer="corpsmtp.techsmith.com"))

$code
[1] "221"

$msg
[1] "mail3.techsmith.com closing connection"

[stefanks80]

I'm having the opposite problem -- the attachment is being written to the body, and results in this overflow error:

## I have from, to, subject, attachmentname defined elsewhere
data(iris)
vroom::vroom_write(iris, file = attachmentName, delim = ",")
subject <- "Hello from R"
body <- list(mime_part("It works!"), mime_part(x=attachmentName))
sendmail(from, to, subject, body,
         control=list(smtpServer="corpsmtp.techsmith.com"))

Error in wait_for(250) : 
  SMTP Error: maximum allowed line length is 998 octets, got 5093

cars because it's smaller works (no error, the email sends). but it puts it in the body and is unintelligible

vroom::vroom_write(cars, file = attachmentName, delim = ",")
subject <- "Hello from R"
body <- list(mime_part("It works!"), mime_part(x=attachmentName))
sendmail(from, to, subject, body,
         control=list(smtpServer="corpsmtp.techsmith.com"))

$code
[1] "221"

$msg
[1] "mail3.techsmith.com closing connection"

I ran in the same issue today. Any ideas on this? Thanks!

[chrisumphlett]

I can tell you what I did. I switched to blastula package and figured out how to use that within Posit Connect. I gave up on getting sendmailR to work. I still use it for other things but not something with a spreadsheet attachment.

[stefanks80]

Thanks, Chris, that's good to know and will me save a lot of time!