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Send email from a PowerShell script

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Windows admins and developers often need a script that fires off an email without standing up an SMTP relay or installing extra modules. PowerShell ships with Invoke-RestMethod on every supported version of Windows, so you can call the Nylas Email API directly over HTTPS. This recipe shows the full path: one authenticated send, secure key storage in Windows Credential Manager, and unattended scheduling with Task Scheduler.

If you work in Bash instead, the Bash and cron version covers the same flow for Linux and macOS, and the CI/CD pipeline guide shows how to send build notifications from a pipeline.

How do you send email from a PowerShell script?

Section titled “How do you send email from a PowerShell script?”

Call the Nylas send endpoint with Invoke-RestMethod -Method Post, passing a Bearer token in the headers and a JSON body built from a PowerShell hashtable. One HTTPS request delivers the message through the connected account, so no local SMTP server is involved. A typical send completes in under 2 seconds.

You need two values before you start: an API key from your dashboard and a grant_id that identifies the connected sending account. See Nylas authentication for how to create a grant. The request below targets the US data region; swap the host for api.eu.nylas.com if your application lives in the EU. PowerShell converts the hashtable to JSON with ConvertTo-Json, and -Depth 4 ensures the nested to array serializes correctly.

The body accepts to, cc, bcc, reply_to, subject, body, attachments, and tracking_options. For the full field reference and attachment encoding, see Send email without SMTP.

How do you store the API key securely on Windows?

Section titled “How do you store the API key securely on Windows?”

Never hardcode the key in the script file. Windows Credential Manager stores secrets in your Windows user account’s encrypted vault, where -Persist LocalMachine keeps them available across logon sessions on that machine, and the Get-StoredCredential approach lets your script read the key at runtime without exposing it in source control or process arguments. The script reads the key at runtime and never writes it to disk, so the plaintext key stays out of source control entirely.

Install the CredentialManager module once, then save the key as a generic credential. The script reads it back at run time and never writes the plaintext to disk. For interactive testing you can also set a session-scoped environment variable, but Credential Manager is the better choice for scheduled tasks that run as a service account. The example reads the stored credential and assigns the password to the same $apiKey variable the send step expects, so the request code stays unchanged.

How do you schedule a PowerShell email send on Windows?

Section titled “How do you schedule a PowerShell email send on Windows?”

Use schtasks to register the script with Windows Task Scheduler so it runs unattended on a fixed schedule. Task Scheduler supports intervals from 1 minute to monthly, runs under a chosen account, and survives reboots, which makes it the Windows equivalent of cron for recurring sends.

Save your send logic to a .ps1 file, then register it. The command below runs the script every day at 02:00. The -ExecutionPolicy Bypass flag lets the scheduler launch an unsigned local script without changing the machine-wide policy, and -WindowStyle Hidden keeps it from flashing a console window. Run the registration from an elevated PowerShell prompt so the task can be created under the system or a dedicated service account.

After registration, confirm the task with schtasks /Query /TN "NightlyEmailJob" and trigger a manual run with schtasks /Run /TN "NightlyEmailJob" to verify the first send before you rely on the schedule.

What’s next

Section titled “What’s next”