Automating PowerShell Reports, Part 2

In “Automating PowerShell Reports, Part 1," I introduced one of my favorite PowerShell cmdlets, send-mailmessage. It's a flexible tool that's essentially a command-line SMTP client, allowing you to send Internet email from the command line. I introduced it because I'll soon be showing you how to use Active Directory’s (AD's) cmdlets to create AD reports, schedule your servers to run those reports in the middle of the night, and automatically email you those reports. But you won't be able do all that unless you enlist the aid of a great power tool, Windows Server's SMTP Server module.

Suppose you have a routine that runs every night at 3 a.m., generating a report called C:reportstoday.html, and you want that report automatically emailed to you at the email account [email protected]. As I demonstrated last month, that command might look like

send-mailmessage -from [email protected] -to [email protected] -subject "Daily Active Directory Report" -body "C:reportstoday.html" -smtpserver ourmailserver.bigfirm.com -bodyashtml

Try running that from a PowerShell command prompt, and it'll probably fail because well-run email servers don't send mail except from authenticated users, which means (in practice) that every time you run send-mailmessage, PowerShell is going to ask you for credentials.

Unfortunately, you won't be around to provide those credentials, because the routine is running in the background at 3 a.m. on some server. What to do? My suggestion is that you don't Google this question; many pages direct you to download and install a random free SMTP server that might or might not be securable. The Internet definitely doesn't need another "open relay," an email server just waiting for some spammer to use it to blight several million mailboxes with junk, and who would want to live with that kind of karma anyway?

Instead, install the SMTP Server service that has shipped with Windows Server for ages, and then configure it so that it doesn't need authentication—but also isn't an open relay. The SMTP Server service used to be a marquee feature of IIS through IIS 6.0, and it has always been a favorite of mine because it's flexible, easy to configure, and programmable. You can actually build things such as spam filters quite easily with VBScript! With Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7.0, however, Microsoft quietly and inexplicably removed it. (Was the reason to boost Exchange Server sales? That's a scary thought!) The company did, however, include the old IIS 6.0 (Windows Server 2003) SMTP module, although installing it from the IIS 7.0 administrative GUI has always eluded me.

With PowerShell, however, it's a snap:

I'm hoping that, if I haven't yet demonstrated why I like the command line for administration, this bit of configuration makes the point! Now you can safely run a send-mailmessage command on that server, being sure to specify -smtpserver localhost, and you won't be asked to authenticate. Now we're ready to get that report rolling, and we'll do that next month.