Email delivery is used by scheduled tasks to send audit reports and change detection alerts. Before you can use email features, you need to configure your SMTP server settings.
Go to Settings → Email to configure the connection.
| Field | Description | Required |
|---|---|---|
| Email Server Name (SMTP) | The hostname or IP address of your mail server (e.g., smtp.office365.com, mail.yourdomain.com, 10.0.1.25) |
Yes |
| Port | The SMTP port number. Common values: 25 (unencrypted), 465 (SSL), 587 (STARTTLS) |
Yes |
| Use Secured Connection (SSL/TLS/STARTTLS) | Enable for encrypted connections. Required by most modern mail servers including Microsoft 365, Gmail SMTP relay, and most hosted email providers | — |
| Use authentication | Enable if your SMTP server requires a username and password to send mail | — |
| User name | The SMTP authentication username (often the full email address) | If auth enabled |
| Password | The SMTP authentication password. Stored securely in Windows Credential Manager | If auth enabled |
| Email sender’s address | The “From” address that appears on sent emails (e.g., ntfs-auditor@yourdomain.com) |
Yes |
| Default email recipient | A default “To” address used when no recipient is specified elsewhere | — |
After entering your settings, click Test message to verify the configuration. The test dialog lets you customize the recipient, subject, and body before sending. If the test message is delivered successfully, your SMTP settings are correctly configured.
If the test fails, check:
Once SMTP is configured, email is available in these features:
Scheduled tasks — When a task completes, it can email the exported report as an attachment to the specified recipients. See Scheduled Tasks.
Change detection alerts — When a scheduled task in Change Detection mode finds permission changes, the change report is exported and emailed. If no changes are found and “Email only if changes found” is enabled, no email is sent.
Error notifications — If a scheduled task fails, an error email is sent to the configured recipients with details about the failure.
To send to multiple recipients, separate email addresses with a semicolon (;) in both the “To” and “CC” fields:
admin@company.com;security@company.com;compliance@company.com
The email subject and body support these variables:
| Variable | Replaced with |
|---|---|
%DATE% |
Today’s date in short date format |
%DATETIME% |
Current date and time in general format |
These work in both the custom email body text (configured per task) and the email subject line.
The SMTP password is stored in Windows Credential Manager under the entry NTFSPermissionsAuditor:SMTP. This is the same secure storage mechanism used by Windows for network passwords and other credentials.
If you disable authentication (uncheck “Use authentication”), the stored SMTP credentials are automatically removed from Credential Manager.
Note: Because credentials are stored in Windows Credential Manager, they are tied to the Windows user account that configured them. If a scheduled task runs under a different user account, SMTP credentials need to be configured for that account as well.