ServiceNow’s capability to automatically create incidents from inbound emails can greatly streamline processes. However, this also poses a challenge when spam emails lead to unwanted incidents. Here's how we tackled this issue using ServiceNow’s Email Address Filters.
The Challenge:
When an email reaches ServiceNow, the inbound action configured would create an incident. While this automation also led to a surge in spam incidents created from Spam Emails.
The Solution:
To classify and filter out spam emails, we leveraged ServiceNow's Email Address Filters feature. This functionality allows for specific email addresses to be listed as exceptions, ensuring that any future emails from these addresses do not trigger incident creation. A new field was added to the incident form to capture the email address from which the incident originated. This would ensure traceability and also provide data to our script for marking emails as spam. From User Experience Point we have created a UI Action for the Service Desk team to classify the incident created from inbound email as spam.
The UI action, aptly named "Mark as Spam", is only visible for users with the "itil_admin" or "admin" roles. Moreover, this action is only available on the created incident form, ensuring users don’t accidentally mark genuine incidents during creation. Clicking the UI Action will pass the inbound email address from the incident form to the script include function which will be added to the exception list through the script.
How It Works:
- The service desk identifies an incident created as a result of a spam email.
- They navigate to the incident record and use the "Mark as Spam" UI action.
- The email address from the "Inbound Email Address" field is passed to the"markAsSpam" function.
- The email address is subsequently added to the exception list, ensuring that any future emails from this address will not create new incidents.
