Email attachment limits exceeded - best practice ?

[tony_hutch]

We have had a couple of occasions where email attachments are either too large in size or too large in the number of attachments to be processed in ServiceNow.

We appreciate there are limits on volume and size of attachments with limited ability to configure.

In this particular application the attachments are key documents that all need to be processed, so the user needs to have confidence that the record is an accurate statement of work.

We understand SN throws away arbitrary attachments once the limits are exceeded. It does log this, but is there a way to mark the new record accordingly so that the end user knows that the data is compromised and can act accordingly.

Is it possible on the inbound rule to know when the incoming email is likely to exceed the limits and flag on the new record ?

Whats the best practice for dealing with this issue ?

What other solutions have people implemented ?

[tony_barratt]

Hi Tony,

First question I think is if you are seeing attachments inside the max size being successfully received?

Note attachments may be bigger than initial size due to encoding in transit.

This will rule out issues outside of the ServiceNow infrastructure - such as send limits imposed by email clients etc.

Configuring Email - ServiceNow Wiki

3 Email Size Restrictions

For instances that use a standard email configuration, the system cannot send or receive emails that are larger than 25MB. Instances configured to use an alternate email configuration may support different maximum total file sizes. The maximum email size limit is enforced regardless of any configured email body or attachment size limits.

Best Regards

Tony

[tony_hutch]

Thanks Tony.

Yes we are seeing attachments inside the max size limit, it's only when they exceed 25MB (18.8MB in our case) or the email contains more than 30 attachments that we are concerned about.

Have you experienced exceeding size and quantity limits before and how did you address this for the end user?

Many thanks

Tony

[morgang7]

While you should be able to adjust glide.email.inbound.max_attachment_count to increase the 30 messages cap, you may also want to query the logs and either set a flag in the records you're staging or run a report / email event when it occurs.

https://<yourinstance>/nav_to.do?uri=sys_email_attachment_list.do?sysparm_query=sys_created_onRELATI...

I'm running the above as a nightly report and will eventually set a flag in the record the inbound email creates so the end users know to go back to the mailbox and have a look at attachments to the original message.   Hope this helps.  

-mg