Adding a variable to a -Body when sending an email - powershell

Question

I'm creating a PowerShell script to make our starters and leavers process smoother. We have a separate team who needs to add certain accounts.
What I'd like to do is take the variable that is declared at the start of the script, the new users name, and put it in an email asking for this other department to set them up.
$username = "joe"
Send-MailMessage -SmtpServer smtp.office365.com -From "it#support.com" -To "other#department.com" -Subject 'Starter/Leaver ' -Body "Hi department, `n `nPlease can you add/remove" $username "from the necessary account please `n `nThanks"
I get an error saying:
Send-MailMessage : A positional parameter cannot be found that accepts argument "joe"

Answer 1

The issue here is that the string object sent to -Body is broken because of the quoting. You can just surround the entire body with one set of quotes to achieve the desired result.
$username = "joe"
Send-MailMessage -SmtpServer smtp.office365.com -From "it#support.com" -To "other#department.com" -Subject 'Starter/Leaver ' -Body "Hi department, `n`nPlease can you add/remove $username from the necessary account please `n`nThanks"
Neater Alternative:
I know this answer is not as concise, but it is more readable and adds some flexibility. It uses a here-string to create the body, which doesn't require having to add all of the line feed characters. It also uses splatting to execute the command. With splatting, you can just update the hash table when you need to change something.
$Body = #"
Hi department,
Please can you add/remove $username from the necessary account please
Thanks
"#
$Message = #{ SmtpServer = 'smtp.office365.com'
From = "it#support.com"
To = "other#department.com"
Subject = 'Starter/Leaver'
Body = $Body
}
Send-MailMessage #Message
When running a PowerShell command, parameters are space-delimited. In the case of Send-MailMessage positional parameters are also allowed, which means you don't have to provide the parameter name when passing in a value. In your attempt, your first quote pair was passed to the -Body parameter. After the first closing quote, a space followed by $username is interpreted. Because positional parameters are enabled for the command, PowerShell attempts to assign $username to a parameter and fails. Of course this also means that if you intend to include a space in your string, it must be surrounded by quotes.
Additional Reading:
See About Parameters for an overview of how parameters work.
See About Splatting for information on splatting.