Project 3: The R Form Mailer

Abstract

Email is something that we simultaneously love and hate. It’s great in that it allows us to conduct quite a bit of business and pleasure through its use, but it can also be an overwhelming avalanche of information when we log in for the first time in several days (or hours, if you’re unlucky!). In this chapter, we’re going to discuss how R can work with email in a few interesting ways. First, we’ll talk about the email packages that R supports. We’ll then dig into one specific package that hooks R up to one of the most popular email providers on the Web: Gmail. We’ll take a side trip down the road of data encryption and security and then return to the big payoff: the R Form Mailer – automated email sending through just a script, making it more flexible than alternatives such as Mail Merge. By the end of this chapter, you’ll be able to send out a bulk email that calculates a salesperson’s commission, without ever needing to take out your calculator. Let’s jump in!