Get-Aduser mail attribute

scism · 2020-04-16T21:25:29.000Z

Hi there,

I have been working on a small script for active directory users. I have most of it written, but one stipulation was to pull the mail attribute and assign it to a variable, and if it doesn’t exist, create a prompt in powershell to add it manually. I added an If/else statement but regardless if the mail property is set or not, it never makes it to the else portion, and overall it just doesn’t work.

$User = Read-Host -Prompt 'Input SamAccountName'

if(Get-Aduser $User -Properties Mail | Select-Object mail){
    $Email = Get-Aduser $Users -Properties 'Mail' | select-Object mail
}else{$Email = Read-host -Prompt 'Email not found. Please Enter Manually'}

my thought process was that if the mail property was set, that it would store it in $Email, else prompt the tech to add it manually. Any feedback would be much appreciated. Thanks!

Neally · 2020-04-16T21:46:43.000Z

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Neally · 2020-04-16T21:52:07.000Z

Are you sure you are looking at the right attribute? There is ‘mail’ and there is ‘emailaddress’ in AD.
If you want to actual value, you have to expand the propery, there are 2 ways to do this:
Look at the output of each

Get-Aduser $User -Properties Mail
Get-Aduser $User -Properties Mail | Select-Object -expandproperty mail
(Get-Aduser $User -Properties Mail).mail

You want to query AD as little as possible, to it’s silly to query twice.

$User  = Read-Host "Input SamAccountName"

$Email = (Get-Aduser $Users -Properties 'Mail').mail

if(-not($email)){
    $Email = Read-host -Prompt 'Email not found. Please Enter Manually'
}

scism · 2020-04-16T22:17:41.000Z

Thank you! that makes so much more sense then what I was doing. Worked like a charm