CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rvbaoutlookrdcomclient
owen88
owen88

Reputation: 474

RDCOMClient read email from a non-Outlook file path

I have a number of emails saved outside my Outlook directory, eg. at some file path "C:\\Users\\foo\\bar.msg".

I would like to read these emails into R using library(RDCOMClient); following this question I have been able to read emails into R from my Outlook folder structure. However given the volume of emails it is not possible to import them into Outlook to read from there.

The answer to this question suggests that within VBA you can use OpenSharedItem to read emails from an external folder, however I haven't been able to translate this into something that works in R. My attempt is:

library(RDCOMClient)

OutApp <- COMCreate("Outlook.Application")
outlookNameSpace <- OutApp$GetNameSpace("MAPI")

message_path <- "C:\\Users\\foo\\bar.msg"
message <- OutApp$OpenSharedItem("message_path")

Upvotes: 0

Views: 489

Answers (3)

Emmanuel Hamel
Emmanuel Hamel

Reputation: 2213

We can also extract the attached files using the following approach :

 library(RDCOMClient)
 destination_dir <- "C:\\Users"
 path_msg <- "C:\\Users\\foo\\bar.msg"
 OutApp <- COMCreate("Outlook.Application")
 outlookNameSpace <- OutApp$GetNameSpace("MAPI")
 message <- outlookNameSpace$OpenSharedItem(path_msg)
 nb_Attached_Files <- message$Attachments()$Count()
 list_Attached_Files <- list()
 
 for(i in 1 : nb_Attached_Files)
 {
   print(i)  
   attachment_file <- paste0(destination_dir, .Platform$file.sep, message$Attachments(i)$Filename())
   list_Attached_Files[[i]] <- attachment_file
   message$Attachments(i)$SaveAsFile(attachment_file)
}

To extract the subject and the body, we can use the following approach :

text_Subject <- message$Subject()
text_Body <- message$Body()

Upvotes: 1

owen88
owen88

Reputation: 474

Turned out there was a wrong object reference in my example above: I reference OutApp rather than outlookNamespace, when calling CreateItemFromTemplate

Maintaining the question as this might save somebody else the search and interpolating the VBA solution into R.

Working solution:

library(RDCOMClient)

OutApp <- COMCreate("Outlook.Application")
outlookNameSpace = OutApp$GetNameSpace("MAPI")

message_path <- "C:\\Users\\foo\\bar.msg"      
message <- outlookNameSpace$OpenSharedItem(message_path)

Upvotes: 1

AColeman
AColeman

Reputation: 555

You may not need to use RDCOMClient at all for this. hrbrmstr has a package on his github called msgxtractr which contains a function read_msg that takes as input a file path and returns a list object with all of the details of the message.

To install the package from github, use 

# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("hrbrmstr/msgxtractr")
# Alternate GitLab Repo:
# remotes::install_gitlab("hrbrmstr/msgxtractr")

Once the package is installed, you could use:

msgxtractr::read_msg("C:\\Users\\foo\\bar.msg")

It's probably worth benchmarking the RDCOMClient solution against msgxtractr. I suspect that RDCOMClient will be a bit slower and probably less stable (since it's communicating between applications).

Upvotes: 1

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