Question

I have a bit of powershell to send an e-mail:

$smtp = new-object Net.Mail.SmtpClient($smtpServer)
$smtp.Send($emailFrom, $emailTo, $subject, $body)

This works perfectly on every machine I’ve ever tried it on until today. I have one machine where I get this error message:

Exception calling “Send” with “4” argument(s): “Failure sending mail.”
At R:\sqlrestore\scripts\Utilities\Check-Lag.ps1:15 char:12
+ $smtp.Send <<<< ($emailFrom, $emailTo, $subject, $body)
+ CategoryInfo : NotSpecified: (:) [], ParentContainsErrorRecordException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : DotNetMethodException

Answer 1

The error message is ambiguous. It turns out the issue is that the SMTP server was inaccessible because outbound SMTP traffic was not allowed.