How do I prevent multiple tickets being automatically created when a user emails ServiceNow with an incident and copies others who can do a REPLY-ALL?

[tlicht]

Scenario in question is:

- user has an incident to report

- user types up an email with ServiceNow mailbox in the distribution list

- user also cc's several others for awareness

- ServiceNow automatically creates the ticket

- folks on the cc list want to know more and so they REPLY-ALL to original email (including Servicenow mailbox)

- ServiceNow automatically creates another ticket...

..and so on...

[TrevorK]

We do not have such logic in our system, however I would analyze your message headers to look and see if you have an "In Reply To" value. I believe the MESSAGE ID field in the header is set by the client and will change, but many use (I am not sure if the RFC states it has to be used so no idea if it works in every case) an IN REPLY TO which works with the MESSAGE ID.

For example, I sent myself a message from my gmail to my work email account. This is what the header has as a MESSAGE ID:

Message-ID: <CABRX1YO-bapWDPhfhfm8AxSUo5UJrKdM5HY8JLcXT8zFGiLYaQ@mail.gmail.com>

I then replied to this from my work account and the following was in the header for the message in my gmail account:

Message-ID: <CY1PR0201MB0908128061C8D46E9735B995A72D0@CY1PR0201MB0908.namprd02.prod.outlook.com>

References: <CABRX1YO-bapWDPhfhfm8AxSUo5UJrKdM5HY8JLcXT8zFGiLYaQ@mail.gmail.com>

In-Reply-To: <CABRX1YO-bapWDPhfhfm8AxSUo5UJrKdM5HY8JLcXT8zFGiLYaQ@mail.gmail.com>

You will notice the MESSAGE ID is different, however there is an IN REPLY TO (and REFERENCES) field.

With this in mind, I would explore the functionality of using the IN REPLY TO field by testing out your scenario. If it works like this (and I do not claim it will, I just did a single test), then you will have a unique identifier in the message that you can use to filter on. Then, you would be able to append to the open incident rather than create a new one.

I think if you can determine whether IN REPLY TO will work, you will then be able to explore the Inbound Action necessary to filter it.

If there is already something in the email object that does this, then hopefully someone smarter than me can respond and let you know of an easy way to read these values. As I mentioned, we have not explored this ourselves.

Here are the definitions from the RFC, I believe they are current but might not be:

4.6.2. IN-REPLY-TO

  The contents of this field identify previous correspon-

  dence which this message answers. Note that if message iden-

  tifiers are used in this field, they must use the msg-id

  specification format.

  4.6.3. REFERENCES

  The contents of this field identify other correspondence

  which this message references. Note that if message identif-

  iers are used, they must use the msg-id specification format.

https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc0822.txt

[tlicht]

Thanks for the quick response! I'll pass this along to my admins/developers to see what we can come up with.