PowerShell: Get Active Directory Username and Email Address of All Group Members

I was recently asked to provide the username and email address of our Active Directory users in a specific group.  This seemed an easy task on the surface.  I ran this code on a small group and worked flawlessly.

Get-ADGroupMember -identity ‘groupname’ | get-aduser -Properties mail |select samaccountname,mail

So I ran the same code on the large group, but it didn’t work.  I got this timeout error instead:

Get-ADGroupMember : The operation returned because the timeout limit was exceeded.
At line:1 char:1
+ Get-ADGroupMember -identity ‘groupname’
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+ CategoryInfo : OperationTimeout: (groupname:ADGroup) [Get-ADGroupMember], TimeoutException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : ActiveDirectoryCmdlet:System.TimeoutException,Microsoft.ActiveDirectory.Management.Commands.G
etADGroupMember

I did some research and found that Get-AdGroupMember does not always work well on large groups.  It waits for a bit and then times out rather than return results.

I found a workaround that works well and does not give timeouts.  Below is a screenshot of the working code, along with the text so you can copy/paste it in.  Just change “YourGroupName” to the name of your group.  If you need any additional properties, add them to my Get-ADUser line.

Screenshot of Working Code:

 

Working Code:

$searchRoot = New-Object System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry
$adSearcher = New-Object System.DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher
$adSearcher.SearchRoot = $searchRoot

$adSearcher.Filter = “(cn=YourGroupName)”

$adSearcher.PropertiesToLoad.Add(“member”)
$samResult = $adSearcher.FindOne()

if($samResult)
{
$adAccount = $samResult.GetDirectoryEntry()
$groupMembership = $adAccount.Properties[“member”]
#$groupMembership | foreach { Write-Host $_ }
}
foreach ($member in $groupmembership) {

Get-ADUser -Filter {distinguishedname -eq $member} -Properties mail | Select-Object samAccountName, mail
}