Download Email Attachments Using Microsoft 365

Source: R/download_mail_attachment.R

This uses the Microsoft365R package to download email attachments via Microsoft 365. Connection will be made using connect_outlook().

download_mail_attachment(
  path = getwd(),
  filename = "mail_{name}_{datetime}",
  search = "hasattachment:yes",
  search_subject = NULL,
  search_from = NULL,
  search_when = NULL,
  search_attachment = NULL,
  folder = get_inbox_name(account = account),
  n = 5,
  sort = "received desc",
  overwrite = TRUE,
  account = connect_outlook(),
  interactive_mode = interactive()
)

Arguments

path

location to save attachment(s) in

filename

new filename for the attachments, use NULL to not alter the filename. The following texts can be used for replacement (invalid filename characters will be replaced with an underscore):

  • "{date}", the received date of the email in format "yyyymmdd"

  • "{time}", the received time of the email in format "HHMMSS"

  • "{datetime}" and "{date_time}", the received date and time of the email in format "yyyymmdd_HHMMSS"

  • "{name}", the name of the sender of the email

  • "{address}", the email address of the sender of the email

  • "{original}", the original filename of the attachment

search

an ODATA filter, ignores sort and defaults to search only mails with attachments

search_subject

a character, equal to search = "subject:(search_subject)", case-insensitive

search_from

a character, equal to search = "from:(search_from)", case-insensitive

search_when

a Date vector of size 1 or 2, equal to search = "received:date1..date2", see Examples

search_attachment

a character to use a regular expression for attachment file names

folder

email folder name to search in, defaults to Inbox of the current user by calling get_inbox_name()

n

maximum number of emails to search

sort

initial sorting

overwrite

a logical to indicate whether existing local files should be overwritten

account

a Microsoft 365 account to use for searching the mails. This has to be an object as returned by connect_outlook() or Microsoft365R::get_business_outlook().

interactive_mode

a logical to indicate interactive mode. In non-interactive mode, all attachments within the search criteria will be downloaded.

Details

search_* arguments will be matched as 'AND'.

search_from can contain any sender name or email address. If search_when has a length over 2, the first and last value will be taken.

Refer to this Microsoft Support page for all filtering options using the search argument.

See also

mail()

Examples

if (FALSE) {
download_mail_attachment(search_when = "2021-10-28")

if (require("certetoolbox")) {
  download_mail_attachment(search_from = "groningen",
                           search_when = last_week(),
                           filename = "groningen_{date_time}")

  download_mail_attachment(search_from = "drenthe",
                           search_when = yesterday(),
                           n = 1)
}
}