How to send mail SMTP with PowerShell

How to send email SMTP with PowerShell? With a Linux user for long time like me, came back to Windows is some new for me.

In working, sometime you will face some stuck like don’t hell know why the application couldn’t send the email. You will want to test the mail connection from your computer, to make sure it’s working.

Okay, now we gonna use PowerShell to test send mail SMTP with authentication.

Get SMTP information first

First of all, we gonna test send an email SMTP with an account to authenticate the mail server. So, you have to get the information like below:

• Username: username use to login to mail server.
• Password: your password use to login to mail server.
• SMTP server: the address of mail server.
• SMTP Port: the port will connect to test send the email.

For example, I get some like below:

• Username: usertest
• Password: Passtest123
• SMTP server: retail.smtp.com (I use smtp.com)
• SMTP Port: 25

Send email SMTP with PowerShell

Now, you go to execute the follow command, remember to change the values as your prefer:

$username = 'usertest'
$password = 'Passtest123'
$secpasswd = ConvertTo-SecureString $password -AsPlainText -Force
$mycreds = New-Object System.Management.Automation.PSCredential ($username, $secpasswd)
Send-MailMessage -Credential $mycreds -SmtpServer retail.smtp.com -Port 25 -From usertest@devopslite.com -To ghost@gmail.com -Subject test -Body test

• $username: this line define the username.
• $password: this line define the password.
• $secpasswd: call a function to convert the plaintext password to secret string.
• $mycreds: make a new object with username and secret password, this one will pass into the Send-MailMessage command.
• Send-MailMessage: the command use to send the email from the address [email protected] to [email protected]. You can also change the contect follow the option -Subject and -Body.

If you’re not use the smtp port 25, you can change the command above to use the port 587 with TLS connection.

$username = 'usertest'
$password = 'Passtest123'
$secpasswd = ConvertTo-SecureString $password -AsPlainText -Force
$mycreds = New-Object System.Management.Automation.PSCredential ($username, $secpasswd)
Send-MailMessage -Credential $mycreds -SmtpServer retail.smtp.com -Port 587 -UseSsl -From usertest@devopslite.com -To ghost@gmail.com -Subject test -Body test

Conclusion

Just with some simple commands, you can test to send the email SMTP with PowerShell in Windows. In my demo, I use the Windows 11 OS so it would be working fine with the others.