Is there a way to ignore certain users on inbound email processing?

seberly · ‎02-09-2015

We have separate admin IDs in our instances, but they have the same email address as their regular account.

Example:

1) The itil account "seberly" has an email of seberly[at]armstrong[dot]com

2) The admin account "seberly-admin" has an email of seberly[at]armstrong[dot]com

The problem is when I send an email to instance@service-now.com, the system associates that email with my seberly-admin instead of seberly. I am wondering if there's a way to ignore a group of users (in this case the admins) when associating emails with users. I understand that we could probably do perform some scripting magic to remedy, but I'm looking to solve the problem before the inbound email actions get processed.

NOTE: I am NOT looking to ignore a sender (email property). I am looking to exclude users from being associated with an email.

Thanks,

Scott

Michael Ritchie · ‎02-09-2015

Played around with this and Julian's suggestion of a business rule on the sys_email is the only way to accomplish this unfortunately. As soon as the inbound emails are processed, server side Java is executed matching the from email address to a user record, only looking at active users. Since this is done server side, there is not a way for you to change this, but you can create a before insert business rule on sys_email to accomplish this:

Pay attention to the order I set above. There is an out of the box business rule with an order of 1100 that runs before insert that sets the mailbox to Inbox so it is important that we run this after that.

Then on the advanced tab, create a script to find the correct user. You can use the sys_email's user_id reference field to dot walk and get the email address so you can query for other users with that same email. Once you have the right user then you will need to update both the user (string field storing the sys_id) and user_id (reference field to user record) fields on this sys_email record.

I hope this helps!

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poyntzj · ‎02-09-2015

I was going to suggest trying something on the sys_email table. Not sure if that would work though as I am not sure where it actually links the user record to the notification etc.

If you could find that, you could create a BR that does a lookup on the user table, if it finds more than 1 contact it returns the non admin account.

Otherwise I'd go with Trey's suggestion or blank the admin accounts email field completely (ours are blank)

treycarroll · ‎02-09-2015

My experience with IEA's is that the association with accounts when an email is received is problematic. It seems to associate with the first (how it determines order is mysterious) account with the sender's address.

I would suggest getting an email alias created for these admin accounts. Then you can change the mail property to point to the aliased email for the admin accounts in service-now. I believe that having a separate email address for these accounts would solve your issue. They could still receive notifications while you avoid having incoming emails associated with those accounts.

seberly · ‎02-09-2015

Trey,

Thanks for your suggestion. I thought about this, and I may end up doing it, but I was looking for a solution that has a little less overhead to manage as we have several admins and I'd prefer to not have to manage these aliases if there's a simpler way to solve the problem.

Thanks!

Scott

Michael Ritchie · ‎02-09-2015

Scott, please see the following thread with a similar request:

Email approvals based on employee number

You could put in similar code to look up the proper user to use.

seberly · ‎02-09-2015

Michael,

Tossed that around internally, but that only solves the problem for approvals. What about for updating comments or the work notes.

Thanks!

Scott