[R] Does R have a command for sending emails?

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Tue, 10 May 2005, Philippe Grosjean wrote:

> Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
>> On Mon, 9 May 2005, Fernando Saldanha wrote:
>> 
>>> Is there a way to have an R program send an email?
>> 
>> 
>> No.  There have been proposals to do this, but it is highly OS-specific, 
>> and also likely to hit security issues.
>> 
>> You could take a look at what bug.report() does (which is nothing on some 
>> platforms).
>
> ...but on most, if not all systems, you can use command-line applications to 
> send emails... and since R can start command-line applications with system(), 
> you should get that functionnality easily "incorporated" into R. Just use 
> Google a little bit!

Yes, that is what bug.report does.  I don't know of one that is guarenteed 
to exist on Windows: the `blat' that Uwe Ligges mentioned is not standard.
(Windows does have a standard set of system calls, and they are quite 
likely to be firewalled from unknown applications like R.)

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595