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rr-markdownblastula

How to remove grey border from Blastula emails in R

By default, Blastula encloses RMarkdown emails with a gray border. This looks wrong on Gmail, as Gmail already adds a gray border to emails, boxing all your rmarkdown mails with a white box inside a gray box, inside a another white box inside yer another gray box.

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The code I used to produce this email is as follows:

informe_html <- readr::read_file("html_email.html")
  email <- compose_email(body = md(informe_html))

My html file has no borders at all, just the dark grey background over a white background. The remaining light gray, white and light gray borders are added by Blastula.

Solution

  • The email object produced from compose_email() contains HTML, so you can use string manipulation to change the appearance of the email. When you inspect the HTML code, the grey looks like it is coming from the <body> tag, which has the style attribute: background-color:#f6f6f6. Removing this tag should remove the grey border around the message.

    blastula_message objects seem to have two versions of the HTML for the message:

    • html_str: The raw HTML stored as a character string.
    • html_html: The HTML stored as a html object.

    The first is what actually gets sent when you use smtp_send() and the second seems to be what you see when you preview the message via print(email). To be safe you can remove the background-color attribute from both:

    email$html_str <- sub(
  x = email$html_str,
  pattern = "background-color:#f6f6f6(;)",
  replacement = "")

email$html_html <- sub(
  x = email$html_html,
  pattern = "background-color:#f6f6f6(;)",
  replacement = "")

    The (;) in the pattern is in case background-color isn't the only style attribute for <body>.

    When you preview email the grey border should now be gone as the background of the mail will now be transparent.