Inbound emails not processed correctly.

[mpo]

This article is related to Knowledge Article created by ServiceNow in January 2018.

Issue description:

Inbound emails are not correctly processed by the system. This is due to a wrong interpretation of the watermark message.

Symptoms:

When approving a Change Request by email, the inbound email is associated to the Change Request rather than the Approval Request itself. A comment is added to the Change Request but the Approval Request status is not updated.

In the email log, the following error/information messages can be seen:

• Processed 'Update Change', updated change_request :CHGXXXXXXX
• Skipping 'Update Approval Request', email is a reply, and the record it matches is not in the Inbound Email Action's table

Resolution:

Set the following system properties to FALSE:

• glide.email.watermark.parse_restrictive
• glide.email.watermark.generate_random

[Dub Myers]

The referenced KB article is more nuanced than this article recommending to disable the feature entirely to solve this problem.

You can leave 'glide.email.watermark.generate_random' set to true. All outbound email from that point will have the random watermarks.  If reply emails are coming in containing the pre-randomized watermark format, then set 'glide.email.watermark.parse_restrictive' to false.  Setting the properties like thls means all your outbound email would contain random watermarks, and both random and non-random watermarks would be recognized on incoming email.

The KB article mentions a transition period.  If you were to immediately set 'glide.email.watermark.parse_restrictive' to true after enabling random watermarks, then you will experience the problem described in your article - restrictive parsing means that since you are generating random watermarks, the system will only recognize random watermarks. It's probable you have outstanding email generated before setting random to true, and those replies still need to be handled for a period of time.

The solution is to relax the incoming parsing temporarily by setting 'glide.email.watermark.parse_restrictive' to false.

There is a (probable) near point in the future when you expect no more reply emails coming in that contain an old-style watermark. At that point, set ' 'glide.email.watermark.parse_restrictive' to true.