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."?

[Brad Tilton]

Hi Eric,

If you can identify that they sent to the wrong address, you could just fire an event in that inbound action that sends an email back to the sender with your message.

[ndt13]

Have you considered changing the "Reply to" address that you can set within the email notification?   You may need to add this field to be displayed on the email notification form, but this should prevent your users from having the email address for your instance.

[ndt13]

You may also want to set the "From" address.   I would make both of these fields match the internal email address that is used for your Service Desk.

[ndt13]

I've attached an email notification that fires from the sys_email table.   It will send a response back to the user if a received email does not find a target record.   I have tested this a couple times and it worked when a new email didn't match any of the conditions for any inbound actions.   However, this email might fire if there are other situations where your instance does not process emails (such as if a user responds to a closed/inactive incident).   In addition to this, I'd still recommend changing the "From" and "Reply to" addresses for your email notifications that get sent to your end users to prevent them from ending up with the wrong email address in the first place.