send emails from R through Outlook

This assumes Outlook Application is installed and your account is set up etc...

Also, you may need to restart Outlook after installing the package in R, if you get an error like 'Error: Exception occurred.'.

library(RDCOMClient)

OutApp <- COMCreate("Outlook.Application")  

outMail = OutApp$CreateItem(0) 

outMail[["To"]] = "recipient's email address" 

outMail[["subject"]] = "subject" 

outMail[["body"]] = "body text" 

outMail$Send()

To send emails to multiple recipients, use semicolon (;) to separate email addresses:

OutApp <- COMCreate("Outlook.Application") 

outMail = OutApp$CreateItem(0)

outMail[["To"]] = "recipient's email address 1; recipient's email address 2"

outMail[["subject"]] = "subject" 

outMail[["body"]] = "body text" 

outMail$Send()

To send emails with attachment(s):

OutApp <- COMCreate("Outlook.Application") 

outMail = OutApp$CreateItem(0)

outMail[["To"]] = "recipient's email address"

outMail[["subject"]] = "subject" 

outMail[["body"]] = "body text" 

outMail[["Attachments"]]$Add("full path to file")     

#e.g. "C:/Users/Documents/someFile.txt"

#note the use of forward slash instead of back slash as you'd normally do in R when setting path to the attachment 

outMail$Send()

To embed table within the body of the email:

library(pander) 

panderOptions('table.split.table', Inf)

OutApp <- COMCreate("Outlook.Application") 

outMail = OutApp$CreateItem(0)

outMail[["To"]] = "recipient's email address"

outMail[["subject"]] = "subject" 

outMail[["body"]] = paste("Hello!", "", "The below summarises xxx:", pandoc.table.return(data.frame(V1 = 1:5, V2 = LETTERS[1:5])), sep = "\n")

outMail$Send()