[noahnoahnoah]

I'm not going to defend this particular set of code or analysis (it's not how I would have done it, and it's a bit silly to use R to wrap a bunch of python code), but the notion that you shouldn't use R for this out of hand is off to me, and just as religious as saying you should always use R.

Use whatever programming language YOU are most productive in. For me, that's often R, even if there's a language that's "better" for a specific task -- it's not necessarily better when it's in my hands. FWIW, there's a much easier way to do this in R as well (libcurl 7.20.0 and later includes smtp, imap, and pop3 protocols, letting you do this without calling out to jython).

There are lots of Turing complete languages. They all can do anything. There's no need for religion about language in any case. Hell, write your killer web app in LOLCODE for all I care.