Emails received with target empty

[Vijay Anusuri]

For few of the HR Tasks, received email with target as empty, but for few of the users it working good.

The issue arises when a user replies to an email sent from a HR Task. However, when the same email is sent to another user, their reply successfully updates the HR Task.

Can someone help with the issue.

Thanks in advance.

[Shraddha Kadam]

Hello @Vijay Anusuri ,

Are you using the inbound action for this ? 

[Sabrina Ethridg]

Does the email address from where they are replying match the email address that is on their sys_user record?

[kmohammed]

Hi Vijay 👋 — good question, and I’ve seen this kind of issue pop up occasionally in HRSD setups. Here’s what’s likely happening and what you can check:

📌Why this might be happening:
When a user replies to an HR Task email, the inbound email action relies on identifying the user from the From address in the email and mapping it to a sys_user record. If it can’t find a matching active user, or if their email isn’t properly set in the Email field on their sys_user record, the inbound action might fail to associate the email with a target task — leaving it empty.

✅What you can check:

1️⃣Make sure the users experiencing the issue have the correct and unique Email address populated in their sys_user record.
(Especially check for duplicates or inactive records with the same email — those can cause conflicts.)

2️⃣Review your Inbound Email Actions configuration for HR Tasks:

• Ensure the conditions are properly targeting the HR Task table

• Confirm the target identification logic is solid (either via instance target or manually locating the task from email content or subject)

3️⃣Check if their replies are being sent from external/personal email addresses not matching the sys_user record — as Sabrina mentioned above 👌

4️⃣(Optional) Enable email logging for a test user’s reply to confirm how the system is processing the inbound email under Email > Received.

📖Pro Tip:
If you’re using OOB HR Task email templates with reply-to tokens, confirm those are generating correctly for both users and that nothing’s stripped out by external mail servers.

✅Summary:

• Verify sys_user email addresses

• Review inbound email actions for HR Tasks

• Check email logs for inbound reply processing
  Once those are in order, this should resolve the empty target issue.

Hope this helps Vijay! If it does, would love it if you could give this a 👍 or mark it helpful so others can find it too. 🚀