Duplicate Comments Added to Case when user Replies

[G24]

When one of our users replies to a case email and the inbound (to our ServiceNow instance) email has "RE: CaseNumber" in the subject line, for example "RE HRC0004171", we end up with DUPLICATE comments going into the Activity stream, as you can see here:

I believe this is happening because TWO different Inbound Actions are running, as you can see here:

What I don't understand is WHY the two different Inbound Email Actions are running.  We have not made any changes to them.

But I did notice that if the user includes a watermark in the Reply this problem does not happen.  But my understanding is that the watermark should NOT be necessary as long as "RE: CaseNumber" is in the subject.

So my question is "Why is this duplicate comment issue happening, and what is the property way to stop it?"

Thanks!!

[JenniferRah]

I'm not familiar with those particular inbound actions, but does the one with the lowest "order" value have the "Stop Processing" checkbox checked? That should keep it from processing another inbound action.

[Bert_c1]

There are two OOB Inbound Actions, one for each table. 'Update HR Payroll Case' and  'Update HR Case' for the two tables in your screenshot (sn_hr_core_case is the parent of the sn_hr_core_case_payroll table). Both have Order set to 100.  You will need to customize one, As Jennifer states, to set the preferred order and also enable the "Stop Processing" there.

Good luck on your decision.

[G24]

Thanks @Bert_c1 and @JenniferRah .  But I really don't want to "Stop Processing" because I have no idea what other Inbound Actions there may be, now or in the future.  Shouldn't an inbound email be associated with EXACTLY one table.  For a Payroll Case, I would expect it to be associated with Payroll (ONLY) and not both Payroll and Core Case.  And I can't disable Core Case, because we have other case types that fit ONLY into Core Case.

[JenniferRah]

That's not really how Inbound Actions work. 

When an email comes in, it goes through the Inbound Actions in the order of the "Order" field until it finds one that this email matches the criteria. Then it does its thing. If the "Stop Processing" checkbox is checked, it stops. If it's not checked, it keeps going and looks at the next one to see if it matches the criteria and so on. 

I doubt if you would ever need 2 records created from the same email, so it would make sense to Stop Processing once you found a match.