Gpg4Win Pass Key PassPhrase in Batch File

In Windows (not sure of *nix OS) the GPG command-line has an obscure switch necessary in order to use the ‐‐passphrase argument: ‐‐pinentry-mode (https://gnupg.org/documentation/manuals/gpgme/Pinentry-Mode.html)

Example:

gpg ‐‐pinentry‐mode loopback ‐‐batch ‐‐yes ‐‐passphrase "<PassPhrase>" "<File>"

Referencing a PSObject property with special characters is pretty easy:

$var = $psobject."Property With Space"

In order to reference properties that include special characters dynamically:

$propertyname = "Property With Space"
$var = $psobject.($propertyname)

This post is really more about the potential problems one might encounter using Send-MailMessage cmdlet in PowerShell to connect and send email via Office 365.

First a quick example:

[SecureString]$o365Password = ConvertTo-SecureString "Your Office 365 Account Password" -AsPlainText -Force
[PSCredential]$o365Credentials = New-Object System.Management.Automation.PSCredential("Your Office 365 Account Username",$o365Password)
Send-MailMessage `
  -Subject "Your Subject" `
  -Body "Your email message" `
  -To "toSomeone@somewhere.com" `
  -From "fromSomeone@somewhereelse.com" `
  -SmtpServer "outlook.office365.com" `
  -Port 587 `
  -Credential $o365Credentials `
  -UseSsl

If the above settings are set correctly the email should be sent.

Some errors you may encounter:

Send-MailMessage : The SMTP server requires a secure connection or the client was not authenticated. The server response was: 5.7.57 SMTP; Client was not authenticated to send 
anonymous mail during MAIL FROM [XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.XXXXXXXX.prod.outlook.com]

• Possibly expired or deactivated Office 365 account
• Confirm username and password by logging into Outlook web access
• Confirm connecting on port 587
• Confirm -UseSSL parameter provided

Send-MailMessage : Unable to connect to the remote server

• SmtpServer parameter is set to “outlook.office365.com”. Lots of other solutions suggest alternatives that may have worked in the past, but did not work for me.

While trying to automate the creation of new IIS websites using PowerShell I needed a script to create IIS virtual directories with a specific login (i.e. Connect As)

After several hours of searching and trying various solutions I finally arrived at this:

$sitename = "My Website Name"
$virtualdirectory = "virtual1"
$virtualdirectorypath = "C:\My Virtual Path"
$username = "username1"
$password = "password1"

New-WebVirtualDirectory -Site $sitename -Name $virtualdirectory -PhysicalPath $virtualdirectorypath 

Set-WebConfigurationProperty "system.applicationHost/sites/site[@name='$sitename']/application[@path='/']/virtualDirectory[@path='$virtualdirectory']" -name userName -value $username

Set-WebConfigurationProperty "system.applicationHost/sites/site[@name='$sitename']/application[@path='/']/virtualDirectory[@path='$virtualdirectory']" -name password -value $password

I tried several path alternatives, however the XPath queries listed in the snippet are the only iteration that worked.

Hope this saves someone else a little time.