How to check whether the email has been sent with Powershell - powershell

Question

I am currently writing a Powershell script, which pings a server and if a connection cannot be established, sends an email to the IT department to restart the server manually.
Right now, the script can successfully send the email when the ping is unsuccessful and the object has a property value, which is supposed to evaluate to "True", but I can't verify that, because upon sending the email, the variable deletes itself and therefore the property doesn't exist anymore.
$Outlook = New-Object -ComObject Outlook.Application
$Mail = $Outlook.CreateItem(0)
$Mail.To = "<recipient>"
$Mail.Cc = "<some_cc>"
$Mail.Send()
# After this line, the variable is deleted!
if ($Mail.Sent())
# The line which is supposed to work, but evaluates to False everytime
How do I make sure that this variable survives until I can verify the exchange?

Answer 1

The variable won't survive after Send method, and won't return a value either.
You are delegating the actual sending action to Outlook so you'll need to check Outlook Application for errors (i.e. a bounce).
If sending via Outlook is not necessary, you can have more options with
try {
Send-MailMessage -From 'monitoring#example.com' -To 'ITdesk#example.com' -Subject 'test' -Body 'whatever' -Priority High -DeliveryNotificationOption OnSuccess, OnFailure -SmtpServer 'mail.example.com' -ErrorAction stop -Port 25
}
catch{
write-warning "error in sending. $_"
}
Note that if you need authenticated send you can specify saved credentials via the -credential parameter.
References here:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.powershell.utility/send-mailmessage?view=powershell-6

Answer 2

You could put the mail.send() inside a try/catch block. That way it would output if there were any errors or if it succeeded. Plus, there's no need for another variable.
try{
mail.send()
write-host "success"
}catch{
write-host "fail"
}