Extract attachments from already-fetched messages

The offline half of the attachment family (since the 2026 refactoring): takes the full text of messages already fetched with ImapCon$fetch_body(), walks the MIME multipart tree by its declared boundaries, and either reports the attachments (dest = NULL) or writes them to disk. It replaces both list_attachments() (reporting) and ImapCon$get_attachments() (writing).

Usage

extract_attachments(
  msg_list,
  dest = NULL,
  content_disposition = "both",
  override = FALSE,
  as_is = FALSE,
  mute = FALSE
)

Arguments

msg_list

A list with the fetched messages, as returned by ImapCon$fetch_body() (the full message, whose headers declare the MIME boundaries). Text-only fetches (fetch_text()) lack those headers and cannot be walked reliably.

dest

NULL (default) to only report: the return value is a named list with one data.frame per message (filename, content_disposition, type, size; zero rows when a message has no attachments). A directory path writes each message's attachments to dest/<message id>/ and returns the same manifest invisibly.

content_disposition

One of "both" (default), "attachment", or "inline".

override

A logical. If TRUE, overrides existing files with the same name. Default is FALSE.

as_is

If TRUE, writes payloads without decoding the transfer encoding. Default is FALSE.

mute

A logical. If TRUE, mutes the confirmation message when writing. Default is FALSE.

Value

A named list of data.frames (see dest).

See also

Other attachments: ImapCon, list_attachments()

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
out <- con$fetch_body(con$query(size > 1e6, use_uid = TRUE), use_uid = TRUE)
extract_attachments(out)                       # report only
extract_attachments(out, dest = "~/attachments") # write files
} # }