Best practice for inbound emails - how do you do it?

[JK1]

Hello everyone,

I would like to hear how do you deal with reply emails in your instance. As you know, there is an issue with pointing the system to the correct record. A Good example would be :

1. I send email, to ServiceNow mailbox, but several other addresses are recipients as well

2. Ticket is created and SN sends back an mail with refI. D and/or number

3. But the users start to reply to the original email (from step 1) so system starts creating new record for that. We end up with 2 records for same thing

We attempted to solve this by doing lookup over the Subject of the email, where we strip the prefixes and suffixes. Still, this is not good enough as some people change the subject ( you cant manage the users so easily ). Or you have emails from automated systems ( for ex. Akamai have such one ) , where every new email has different subject, but its for same thing ( ticket usually ).

So, how do you deal with such situations ?

Cheers,

Joro

[Kalaiarasan Pus]

Do you have a reply or forward inbound action along with new for the same table? From the question it seems like you don't.

Adding these should take care of most of the issues of duplicate requests, etc.

[JK1]

Hi Kalaiarasan,

yes I have. New, Reply, Forward with different wight. But there is no easy way, the system to recognize, to where to map the email (I mean, to which particular record to map it) if the email does not have Ref. or at least the number of the ticket. Its recognized as Reply, but that's all - the target is stays empty hence nothing happens.

This is why I am asking, if someone already solved that.

[Kalaiarasan Pus]

Is there an issue with watermarks? Ideally the reply type should match to an existing target record.

[JK1]

No,

no issue with watermarks. The issue is with the users When from an existing email chain ( some guys are arguing/discussing something and decide to open incident in SN, so they just add in the mail chain the SN mailbox where the inbound action is listening ) someone adds and SN mailbox, SN creates outbound email ( INC0001 created, having both watermark (ref.ID) and incident number in the subject, sent to the correct users ), this email is not used by the users to reply to the system, but they use the original email chain.

Example:

We send back and forth emails between us. So first time I send this mail to you it would say Subject : "Hello" Body "How are you doing?" Msg#1 . Then you reply back, Subject: "RE: Hello", Body : "Not so good, monitoring is not working at all . ---Original Message--- From some address here: ----- Message ------ How are you doing?" Msg#2.

So I add to the thread and SN mailbox - Msg#3 Subject"RE: Hello" Body : "Issue with mon " + orig message, so ticket is created. SN sends it over - Msg#4 "INC0001 created" , but when you receive the ticket from SN,you do NOT use it, but continue to use the original mail chain but with the SN in cc or as recipient - using the Msg#3.