How to Send Emails Using PowerShell

Windows PowerShell is a command-line shell used to solve some administration tasks in Windows and apps running on this OS. A common scripting language allows you to tailor cmdlets to perform specific functions.

Sending emails is one of them. This article will discuss using Windows PowerShell to send emails and other ways to handle this method.

Send Emails Using Send-MailMessage Cmdlet in PowerShell

Here is an example based on the Send-MailMessage cmdlet you can use right now to send an email from PowerShell using SMTP protocol.

Send-MailMessage -To "user@contoso.com" -From "user@abccompany.net"  -Subject "Hello!" -Body "This is important" -Credential (Get-Credential) -SmtpServer "smtp.gmail.com" -Port 587

All we need is to insert the email address of the sender and the recipient and specify the SMTP server that we are going to use.

The Send-MailMessage cmdlet also lets you put more details on your email with the command’s many parameters. Here is the list of parameters that we can use using the cmdlet.

You can assign the parameter values to a variable first before inserting them into the command line for easier readability.

$From = "user@abccompany.net"
$To = "user@contoso.com"
$Copy = "manager@contoso.com"
$Attachment = "C:\Temp\file.jpg"
$Subject = "Photos of Drogon"
$Body = "<br>Please see attached picture for reference."
$SMTPServer = "smtp.gmail.com"
$SMTPPort = "465"

Send-MailMessage -From $From -To $To -Cc $Copy -Subject $Subject -Body $Body -SmtpServer $SMTPServer -Port $SMTPPort -UseSsl -Credential (Get-Credential) -Attachments $Attachment

By default, the Send-MailMessage command tries to send an email via the standard SMTP port TCP 25.

However, suppose your SMTP server allows sending email only using an encrypted protocol. In that case, we can specify the port number the most often; it is 465 or 587 and the -UseSSL switch parameter.

The table below shows the list of SMTP server parameters of the popular public email providers that we can use to send messages from Windows PowerShell (note that we will have to allow sending emails via SMTP in the account interface):