Email Attachments Extraction

The purpose of this workflow is to showcase the "Email Connector (Labs)" and "Email Reader (Labs)" nodes. The workflow aims to access all attachments from the email inbox and read them in the KNIME Analytics Platform.

You can easily download and run the workflow within your KNIME installation. For optimal performance, we recommend using the latest version of the KNIME Analytics Platform.

To execute the workflow, you don't have to provide email server details such as address, port or user login credentials. The "Email Inbox Setup" component sets up a self-contained mail server. It includes four folders and ten simulated emails with counterfeit attachments ready for use.
For more information, refer to the component description.

To connect to your ISP email account using IMAP protocol (e.g. Gmail or Outlook) via Email Connector (Labs) node, check external resources.

Hence, there is no need to provide any additional information in the "Email Connector (Labs)" node. All node configurations are managed by the variables previously created by the component. The inbox of User2 is being connected to since it is the inbox where the fake emails were sent.

We use the "Email Reader (Labs)" node to read emails from the inbox. Since the other folders are empty, we only need to focus on this particular folder. By clicking "Show advanced settings", we can check the "Output attachments table" option, which extracts all the attachments from the emails. A second table output port will appear.

After extracting the attachments as binary objects, we utilize the "Binary Objects to Files" node to write them into a temporary folder that we create using the "Create Temp Folder" within the workflow data area. It is important to mention that we use the column "File name" as the new file names, including the original file names and their respective file extensions.

Finally, we read all file attachments from the recently created temporary folder using the "Excel Reader" node. Since the files have the same structure, only one node is needed to accomplish the task. We then visualize the data using the "Table View" node.

External resources

• POP, IMAP, and SMTP settings for Outlook.com
• Set up Gmail with a third-party email client