Inbound email action to notify sender they sent message to wrong address

[Eric K3]

We have users who are mistakenly sending emails to our SN instance email address rather than our Service Desk email.

Both our instance email and our Service Desk email are named "WNY Service Desk." When users receive a notification from the instance, the address is saved in the users' local address book, which then makes their email client have the global "WNY Service Desk" address and the local "WNY Service Desk" address. Then, when a user goes to send an email to our Service Desk, they start typing in WNY in the To: field and choose the first one that comes up (the wrong local WNY Service Desk address that goes to our instance). They send the message thinking they are sending to our Service Desk and they never receive a response from our instance.

How would I create an inbound email action so that, when our instance receives an email that has no connection to any task or record in the system, it sends a reply to the sender that says something like "There is no corresponding record in the SN system to process this email. You may have sent this email in error to the wrong address."?

[Eric K3]

Thank you.

If we tell our users to reply to the SN email in order to update their incident, then I cannot change the "From" and "Reply to" fields, correct? If I changed those fields, then the replies do not get to the instance for the inbound email action to update the incident with the body of the email.

[ndt13]

Does your internal service desk email address automatically forward mail to ServiceNow?   If you are using the OOB "Update Incident" inbound action, it will still update the incidents.   SN will see that the emails is type=reply and then look for the watermark at the bottom of the email.   As long as the reply email is making it to your instance, it will append the reply to the original incident.

You can try this from your own mailbox before making any changes in ServiceNow.   Open a test incident and then attempt to reply to it from your mailbox as a user would do.   However, before sending the message, manually change the "To" field to your internal service desk address (assuming it will forward to SN).

[Eric K3]

When users receive our SN notifications, that SN name/address is auto saved in the user's contact list.

Our SN name/address is "Company Service Desk" servicedesk@service-now.com

Our group email name/address is "Company Service Desk" servicedesk@company.com

When users are creating a new email, they start typing "Company Serv..." and then just hit enter to select the address, which unfortunately picks the wrong @service-now.com name/address.

So, apart from changing the name of our company@service-now.com address from "Company Service Desk" to something like "ServiceNow Company Service Desk", how would I, or what would an inbound email script look like, to notify the user when they have mistakenly sent an email to company@service-now.com?

[Eric K3]

I do not want to change the from or reply-to addresses because our users reply to the SN email notifications to update their incidents.

[Eric K3 · Accepted solution]

Easiest solution was to activate and edit the "Create Incident" inbound email action so that an incident is created and assigned to the SD, so they can contact the user directly. Not the most elegant solution, but it solves the problem. Thank you everyone for your input.