PS script not emailing properly formatted output - powershell

Question

I have the following command running from a powershell script which gives me the info I need and is all nicely formatted in a table. The command is:
gcloud --project $gcpProject compute snapshots list --format="table[box,title='GCP Project:$gcpProject snapshots for $yesterday'](name,creationTimestamp,diskSizeGb,storageBytes)" --filter="creationTimestamp.date('%Y-%m-%d')=$yesterday"
I have a Start-Transcript -path $Log1 near the beginning of that script.
This is the output from the gcloud command that I get in PS:
┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ GCP snapshots │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┬───────────────────────────────┬──────────────┬───────────────┤
│ NAME │ CREATION_TIMESTAMP │ DISK_SIZE_GB │ STORAGE_BYTES │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────────────┼──────────────┼───────────────┤
│ snapshot1-us-central1-a-20191024022411-1ub96cw9 │ 2019-10-23T19:24:11.743-07:00 │ 500 │ 1104631168 │
│ snapshot2-us-east1-b-20191024020148-iusphq0h │ 2019-10-23T19:01:49.100-07:00 │ 900 │ 1129102848 │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┴───────────────────────────────┴──────────────┴───────────────┘
This is just how I want the email recipient to see it when they open their email. But I can't figure out what I need to do in order to send this as the $body of the email and properly formatted. In Notepad++ it looks perfect too but not if I copy & paste it into a new email.
When I get the email the table is all gibberish (lines are made with a bunch of ????) and table is not formatted properly. I tried ConvertTo-Html and -BodyAsHtml but none of that worked.
Here's my code for sending the email:
If (Test-Path $Log1) {
$body = #(Get-Content -Path $Log1).
Where({ $_.Trim() -notin $pattern2 -and $_ -NotMatch "End time: 20.*|Start time: 20.*" }) # Trimming some things from the Log1 file that I don't want included in the email
send-MailMessage -SmtpServer $SmtpServer -Port $SmtpPort -Credential $Cred -UseSsl -Verbose -To $to -From $from -Subject $subject -Body ($body | out-string)
}

Answer 1

The problem is most likely that when you paste the text from Notepad/Notepad++ into a new email, your client is not using a fixed width font. You can try changing your email font to something fixed-width, then pasting (keeping text-data only) or changing from an HTML formatted email to a plaintext one.
You will also want to make sure that when the email is sending from Powershell that it's either being sent as plaintext (Outlook and other clients usually render plaintext emails in a fixed width font by default), or that you are selecting a well-known fixed width font for your text in the HTML body. But at that point, you might as well just send an HTML-formatted table and plug in the data that way.
If this is used for any sort of automation though I'd highly recommend just putting the data in a CSV for ease of parsing.

Answer 2

I was able to resolve it by formatting the output from gcloud as csv then converting it to html with:
$body = Import-Csv c:\report.csv | ConverTo-Html -head a$ -Body "<H2>My Header</H2>"
where a$ sets the HTML head information:
$a = "<style>"
$a = $a + "BODY{background-color:peachpuff;}"
$a = $a + "TABLE{border-width: 1px;border-style: solid;border-color: black;border-collapse: collapse;}"
$a = $a + "TH{border-width: 1px;padding: 0px;border-style: solid;border-color: black;background-color:red}"
$a = $a + "TD{border-width: 1px;padding: 0px;border-style: solid;border-color: black;background-color:green}"
$a = $a + "</style>"
Then for send-MailMessage I simply added -BodyAsHtml