How does servicenow detect whether a received email is New/Reply/Forward

[rev3]

Hello All,

When Servicenow receives emails, how does it validate if its reply or new or a forward email. I know field "receive type" is populated with new/Reply /Forward. But i want to know how it detects.

My dev instance received a reply email but was detected as new instead of reply.

Any knowledge will be helpful.

Thank You

[rev3]

Hello Tony,

Thank you for response. The picture really helped to understand. I feel there is a need to explain my case.

User A sends an email to a group email ID B. Because servicenow email id is added to the group email id Distribution List, a Request is generated in Service now using an inbound email action.

If a member of that group replies to the email, say C replies All to A's email . In this case when the reply email is received by servicenow is classified as New.

And it looks like it is doing what it is told to (according to the picture).

Possible workaround: Adding a condition that checks if subject is not starting with RE.

But am I the only one having this concern and is there an alternative workaround for this?

Thank You

[Michael Ritchie]

You definitely have a unique situation.   I haven't seen anyone add the SN email address to a distribution list.   Typically there is an internal email address setup that just redirects emails to ServiceNow so inbound only and each inbound email is a unique request.

Parsing emails is challenging.   You have to code for all situations looking for specific patterns in the email text.   If anything is off, then your code fails.   Given that these are all inbound emails, the ServiceNow watermark isn't included with anyone else responding since that is generated on outbound emails from ServiceNow.   So without this, how do you correlate the first email and all the responses?   You could see if the email subject matches but that isn't 100%.

I would rethink what you are doing and see if there is any common attribute about each email coming in and code your script looking for that.   Again parsing email is challenging and many people are getting away from it and pointing users to self service instead.

[rev3]

Hi Michael,

Totally agree what you said. Also, we are making efforts to communicate users to self service but it may take a while here.

Appreciate your efforts!

Thanks much!!

Reva