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!!

[G24]

Thanks for that perspective.  But I can imagine a scenario where I do want multiple Inbound Actions to run.

I'm still not understanding how Actions which specify two different tables are triggering.

[JenniferRah]

Inbound Actions trigger based on the incoming email. If you look at the triggers, they will say things like the subject contains certain words or phrases, or it is coming from a specific user/email address. If you don't stop processing after you run one, it keeps going and could match on several inbound actions. 

Consider the following scenario:

You send an email with a subject of "My comments" that comes from George Washington. You have the following inbound actions: 

Order: 10
Table: incident
Condition: Subject contains "comments"
Stop processing: false

Order: 20
Table: sc_task
Condition: Subject contains "comments"
Stop processing: false

Order: 30
Table: incident
Condition: Sender is George Washington
Stop processing: false

Because "stop processing" is false on all of these, it would process all of them and create 2 incidents and an sc_task. If you changed it to this: 

Order: 10
Table: incident
Condition: Subject contains "comments"
Stop processing: true

Order: 20
Table: sc_task
Condition: Subject contains "comments"
Stop processing: false

Order: 30
Table: incident
Condition: Sender is George Washington
Stop processing: false

It would only create an incident and then stop processing.

[Bert_c1]

As @JenniferRah describes below, Inbound actions run based on the Conditions, and in her example, the scripts can deal with different tables.  Seems you may consider Inbound Flows, to get whatever behavior you want.

processing-inbound-emails.html

Good luck on your goal.