Send Automated Email with PowerShell
I am supposed to send a weekly status report to my team lead and manager every week. I really like that the company takes an effort to know what is going on with the employees, and I like that I have the ability to speak up as soon as an issue arises. However, I almost always forget to send this email. I have set an alarm, and I am almost always busy when it goes off. By the time I finish what I am doing, I forget the write the email and then it doesn’t get done. I thought a fun project would be to create a PowerShell script to email me every Friday with a randomly generated status update. I don’t want to send this randomly generated status automatically to my boss (just in case one week I want to add something to the status), so I will have it email me at work and my personal email. The update has two parts: how I feel about my work and how I feel about my department. For each of these, I wrote a few ‘beginning’ sentences and a few ‘ending’ sentences. The script picks a random beginning and ending sentence for each category (work and department), color codes it, and sends the email to my personal and my work emails. First, I set the email addresses and the subject:
$From = “From@yourdomain.com“
$To = “To@yourdomain.com“
$Cc = “MyWork@yourdomain.com“
$Subject = “Weekly Status Report - AIT”
Next, I set my work beginning sentence list and choose a random entry from it. This general syntax is repeated a total of 4 times (two for work and two for department):
$array = “I am enjoying my job. “, “It’s still good. “, “I’m still excited about my job. “
$work = $array[(Get-Random -Maximum $array.count)]
$array = “I am happy to be contributing.”, “I’m excited to be be more self sufficient every week.”, “I am looking forward to getting more into the reporting tickets.” , “I am excited to be working on more difficult tickets”
$work += $array[(Get-Random -Maximum $array.count)]
$array = “I am enjoying being here. “, “My relationship with the department is still good. “, “I enjoy working with my coworkers. “
$department = $array[(Get-Random -Maximum $array.Count)]
$array = “I appreciate how much work the company puts into the culture.”, “I am excited that I am starting to help others out.”, “I am happy that I have been able to help others in the department.”
$department += $array[(Get-Random -Maximum $array.Count)]
Now we can set up the body. Part of the requirement for my status report is that each section (work/department) has to be color coded (green/yellow/red). I want to default this to green. In order to do that, we’ll have to write a little bit of HTML in the body of our email to highlight the text. The body variable looks like this:
$Body = “
My Relationship With My Work -
$work
My Relationship With Seven Corners/Department -
$department "This is pretty simple HTML. We are setting a style tag to highlight text as lime. We will highlight just the $work and $department variables (but we will leave the ‘My Relationship’ headings). Finally, we will set up the gmail SMTP server and port variables:
$SMTPServer = “smtp.gmail.com”
$SMTPPort = “587”
Now, we will set up our Gmail username and password and send the message:
$username = “yourusername”
$password = ConvertTo-SecureString “yourpassword” -AsPlainText -Force
$mycred = New-Object System.Management.Automation.PSCredential($username, $password)
Send-MailMessage -From $From -to $To -Cc $Cc -Subject $Subject -Body $Body -BodyAsHtml -SmtpServer $SMTPServer -port $SMTPPort -UseSsl
-Credential ($mycred)
Note that for the password string, you have to use ConvertTo-SecureString for this to work! The last step was to simply set this script to run automatically every Friday at 2 pm. To do this, I set up a task in the task scheduler (which we discussed here). The only tricky part was that the action needed to start a program, with the program variable ‘powershell’ and the arguments -file “filelocation”. That’s it! Hopefully this will help me remember to send this every week! Have questions or suggestions? Please feel free to comment below or contact me.