Is there a way to prevent duplicate notifications from going out when a comment is attached from an inbound email?

[andrewcrawford]

Currently, by default, we send out notifications for every comment added to the incident form. However, we run into an issue when we email a client directly, and have the body of that email attached to the incident as a comment. This leads to the client immediately getting a notification with the same information they just received from the original email.

Since we need to make sure that comments added directly to the incident form are still sending out email notifications, we need to design something that will recognize when a comment is added from an inbound email, and know not to send out a notification. I originally tried designing a notification rule that overrides the existing comment notification, but I could not figure out which event to put in the "when to send" conditions that would lead to this rule working correctly. ServiceNow HI informed me that there was no way to accomplish this out-of-the-box, and that it could possibly be custom scripted, but I don't know how to go about doing that either.

[andrewcrawford]

Basically, we have received complaints from clients that when we email them directly with an update, and that email is attached to the incident, they then receive a second email containing the exact same information. For some of our less technically inclined clients, they don't understand how this process works, and get confused by multiple emails going to them around the same time.

[Chuck Tomasi · Accepted solution]

Hi Andrew,

Can you explain "When we email them directly?" Are you talking about directly from Outlook (or some other mail client app) outside of ServiceNow?

If that's the case an the mail goes back to ServiceNow (and the user), ServiceNow updates the incident, triggers a notification with the same comments, and the user gets that one. Let me know if I'm close to hitting the dart board on this one.

If that's the case, this is a process issue more than a technology issue. The answer is, stop replying to messages from Outlook. ServiceNow doesn't have way to determine if the incident was updated from an email or from a browser. It just knows "Someone made comments, send an email."

[andrewcrawford]

Yes, you are absolutely on the mark there. We email them from Outlook, CCing our attach alias, and that email update is added to the incident as a comment. Then the client gets a notification that a comment has been added.

Thanks for the update, I will relay to my team that we will need to adjust our updating process if we want to remove these extra notifications from going out.

[El Aziza]

Hi,
I had the same problem.
This solution solved it
I changed the weight filed to 30 for example.

Thanks Tomasi,

[Rohit Kumar]

Can you check by updating the filter in notification like say.

UpdatedBy doesn't contain Caller.

It may restrict the email to caller.