Has anyone created a 'catch all' inbound action in case all others fail?

[Alex Macdonel]

Every once in a while a user replies to an email where we are not requiring or expecting a reply to that has no inbound action defined so ServiceNow ignores the message; this ultimately is seen as a lack of service from our part and I'm trying to come up with a 'catch all' inbound action that, once all other rules are processed, if none run, I create an incident for someone on the Service Desk to look at.

Has anyone done something like this? What are your suggestions? Did I miss an entry in SN's wiki explaining how to do this?

Thanks!

Alex Macdonel

[Michael Fry1]

If someone replies to an email, whether you are expecting it or not, it should have a watermark in the email and the response will map back to the ticket.

If no watermark, and they reference the ticket number in the subject, and they are a valid user, the update will still occur.

If they aren't a valid user, as long as Guest account is active, a new ticket will be created with Guest as the caller.

If the Guest account isn't active, no ticket is created, but that's where you have to trigger a notification to someone to alert them.

Does this help explain your options?

[Alex Macdonel]

Michael, I'm not looking for how SN links emails to tasks. You missed how SN uses MessageID's to track replies too.

[Uncle Rob]

All the time, but my strategy is highly dependent on the situation.   Once you drive ServiceNow beyond IT, you deal with their email intake mechanisms too, which make a universal catch-all pretty difficult.

Another sticky situation I deal with often is a multi-target email that starts everything.   User A emails ServiceDesk and CC's users B, C, and D.   Ticket gets created, and then hours later User B responds to the original email message.   But that actually results in *more* tickets and I think you're worried about *no* tickets.

Can you give us a specific example of a miss?

[Alex Macdonel]

It seems I didn't explain what I'm trying to accomplish.

What I'm trying to avoid is to write an inbound action for every table in the system that could potentially receive one of two types of email (replies, forwards).

Examples would be a scheduled report sent by mail, 'opened' REQ notifications or RITM 'complete' notifications. In all these cases I'm not expecting a reply but from time to time customers decide to reply to them.

In a nutshell, I'm trying to create an inbound action that says: if no other inbound action applies, create an incident.