Populate a Mailbox with a Subset of the Enron Corpus

Downloads the public Enron e-mail corpus (CMU, May 7 2015 release; ~423 MB, one time, cached locally), selects a subset by custodian, folder, and date, and ingests it into the connected IMAP server through ingest_maildir -- i.e., through the package's own APPEND implementation. One server folder is created per custodian. It is meant to be run against the disposable local Docker IMAP server shipped in system.file("docker", package = "mRpostman"), providing real data for demonstrations and teaching on top of the synthetic corpus of sandbox_corpus.

enron_sandbox(
  con,
  custodians = c("kaminski-v", "lay-k", "skilling-j"),
  folder_pattern = "^_?sent(_items|_mail)?$",
  sent_since = NULL,
  sent_before = NULL,
  max_msgs = Inf,
  cache_dir = tools::R_user_dir("mRpostman", "cache"),
  url = "https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~enron/enron_mail_20150507.tar.gz",
  ask = TRUE,
  mute = FALSE
)

Arguments

con	An ImapCon object, as returned by configure_imap.
custodians	A character vector of custodian directory names, e.g. c("kaminski-v", "lay-k", "skilling-j") (the default). The 150 available names are the directories of the corpus' maildir/ root.
folder_pattern	A regular expression matched against the custodians' folder names. The default, "^_?sent(_items|_mail)?$", selects the sent-mail folder variants. Use ".*" for all folders of the selected custodians.
sent_since, sent_before	Optional Date (or "YYYY-MM-DD" string) limits applied to each message's Date: header before ingestion. NULL (default) applies no limit.
max_msgs	Maximum number of messages per custodian, applied after the other filters. Default is Inf.
cache_dir	Directory where the corpus tarball and its extraction are cached across sessions. Default is tools::R_user_dir("mRpostman", "cache").
url	URL of the corpus tarball. Default is the CMU distribution point.
ask	A logical. If TRUE (default), asks for confirmation before the one-time ~423 MB download (~1.4 GB extracted). Set to FALSE for non-interactive use.
mute	A logical. Passed to ingest_maildir. Default is FALSE.

Value

Invisibly, a data.frame with one row per ingested message: custodian, path (relative to the corpus root), size, date (parsed from the header; NA when unparseable), and appended.

Details

The corpus was released into the public domain by the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and is curated at Carnegie Mellon University (https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~enron/); it contains about 517,000 messages from 150 custodians in maildir layout, without attachments. Nothing is downloaded when the cache is already in place. If the download fails (offline use, moved URL), the function fails gracefully with an informative message and leaves the cache untouched. Date filtering parses each candidate file's Date: header locale-independently; messages without a parseable date are kept unless both limits are set.

See also

Other sandbox: ingest_maildir(), populate_sandbox(), sandbox_corpus()

Examples

if (FALSE) {
con <- configure_imap(url = "imap://localhost:1430",
                      username = "enron", password = "sandbox",
                      use_ssl = FALSE)
# sent mail of three central custodians, 2000-2002
manifest <- enron_sandbox(con,
                          custodians = c("kaminski-v", "lay-k",
                                         "skilling-j"),
                          sent_since  = "2000-01-01",
                          sent_before = "2002-07-01")
table(manifest$custodian, manifest$appended)
}