Inbound Email Update Action - Reply Prefixes Not Working

[lgustafson]

Hi All,

I have a client who has been struggling with updating incidents via inbound email actions.   According to the ServiceNow Wiki, a Reply inbound email action type should be created under the following conditions:

The email contains one of the following conditions and the table specified in the email matches the table of the inbound action:

1. A valid watermark that matches an existing record.
2. An In-Reply-To email header (when no watermark is present) that matches an existing record.
3. A subject line starting with a recognized reply prefix (when neither a watermark nor an In-Reply-To header is present) and a valid record number that matches an existing record.

However, emailing, for example, "re: INC0000001", or any variation of that as the subject, only creates a new record.   On further research, I found this SN Guru article stating that:

• Subject Prefix is insignificant (The system doesn't care if the subject starts with 'Re:', 'Reply:', or 'Chicken:')

Can anyone make sense of this for me?   Is the ServiceNow Wiki right, and I'm just doing something wrong?

Thanks for your thoughts,

Lesley

[samiul1]

Hi All,

I am having the exact same issue.

Has anybody found any resolution on this?

Regards,

Samiul

[samiul1]

Hi All,

Has anybody found any resolution on this as I am also stuck with this same problem.

Please advise.

Regards,

Samiul

[rcm]

I have the same issue in my prod instance which is running Fuji - has anyone found a resolution to this ?

I am running the same version in my dev instance but the incidents are updated.

[namita_oberoi]

Hi,

Were you able to figure this out?

Regards,

[mike_zelnik]

I see this is an old question but I am concerned there is no answer and so many seem to be having this issue.

First, ignore the SN Guru article, it is not accurate, the wiki is correct.

It's clear you are having an issue with number 3, so I will focus on this condition.   The subject line starting with a recognized reply prefix and containing a valid record number which matches an existing record.  

This portion of the wiki covers some different examples of how SN tries to match a record in the system:

http://wiki.servicenow.com/index.php?title=Inbound_Email_Actions#Examples_of_Matching_Record_Numbers...

SN will parse the subject line on spaces, so if you have "INC0000001-" it will not find the number.   The colon will also be taken into account, so re:INC0000001 should work fine.

So for your example, re: INC0000001, first make sure INC0000001 is a number that is on your instance.

SN will parse out the INC and match it against the prefix on the sys_number table to find which table to query.   In this case it is the incident table but you may want to double check the sys_number table in other cases.

Also, the Display Name of the table is used to find the record.   If the Display Name is not "number" then we will not be able to find the record.   You can check this by doing the following in scripts - background:

var gr1 = new GlideRecord('incident');

gs.print(gr1.getDisplayName());

You can use this to see the DisplayValue for a particular record:

var gr2 = new GlideRecord('incident');

gr2.addQuery('number','INC0000001');

gr2.query();

if(gr2.next())

gs.print(gr2.getDisplayValue());

You can also use the dictionary to check the Display Name but sometimes the dictionary can be overridden and it's not obvious until you look at the actual getDisplayName() results.

Now that the DisplayName is verified to be "number" and we have validated the incident table uses the prefix of "INC" in the sys_number table, the query should locate the record and classify the email as a receive_type of Reply and run the email.read event against the Reply inbound actions for the incident table.   The Target record will also be updated with this Incident assuming you are updating the 'current' record in the inbound action and not using your own GlideRecord.

I hope this helps resolve the issue.   If you are still having trouble, I suggest opening an incident with SN in Hi.