Inbound Action - Preventing ticket creation for duplicate emails received

[SteveS]

I am trying to find out how I could prevent a ticket's creation for duplicate emails received. We only have one inbound action that will create a new incident when a email is received from a certain email address (a server) with a specific subject/body. The problem is that sometimes we receive 2-3 duplicate emails milliseconds (possibly seconds) apart from each other from this certain email address (a server) which would cause a ticket to be created for each email.

I would like to prevent a duplicate ticket from being created if there is already one that was just opened. Any help would be greatly appreciated

[mwascak]

None of my instances or the Demo instances have a 'Create New Call' module in 'Service-Desk' Are you speaking of the first module 'New Call'? If so the submit button shouldn't creating multiple tickets.

You might need to elaborate here.

[lesleymills]

Hi Matt,
On our lefthand navigation we have 'new call/quick close' modules under 'Service Desk'. Guessing from your comment that these are custom modules designed when our system was set up by our local provider Keystone and so you might not have these in your instance. This module is designed to allow users to create their own issue in Service Now. The problem I'm having is that when ServiceNow isn't responding quickly enough to them when they hit 'create new record' on the top navigation bar, they keep hitting this button and several create requests are being fired off before the first one comes back and updates the ticket. I think that the comment from Dinga below yours might be the solution. We need to somehow catch these multiple create requests and check that they aren't in fact the same request being sent multiple times.

[Dinga]

Leslie, from your description, I think that the problem I was encountering is completely separate from what you're running into right now. However, try this and see if it helps. In the sidebar, go to System Properties | System and look for a checkbox option:

Assign a task number only upon insert (prevents unused numbers)

If you uncheck this box and a number is assigned to new issues prior to being submitted to the server for processing, your users may only succeed in creating a single record or (depending on other settings) may receive a notification warning of simultaneous updates and asking if they'd like to overwrite the current record with the same issue/incident ID (which would be the one that was just submitted simultaneously anyway).

[lesleymills]

from reading the comments posted it looks like we all have the same issue with autogenerated emails creating duplicates. We haven't tried any of the code everyone's posted yet as we're in the middle of an upgrade.

I'm going to be cheeky here and ask if anyone else out there in ServiceNow land who has dealt with this, has a tried and tested piece of code that we could all use. Great opportunity for you 'old timers' to show us 'younguns' how marvellous you are by sharing your code.

BTW Dinga, MB, Steve S, Miller_paul etc please check your system clock or whatever as your posts are coming up with some real strange dates for your posts.

[Dinga]

Well, the code I posted on "Fri, 08/19/2011 - 13:42" worked perfectly fine to resolve my situation, if I recall correctly. Maybe something got lost in translation or I misread which post was from whom, but I thought your issue had nothing to do with auto-generated inbound emails and everything to do with users repeatedly clicking a "Submit New Incident" or similar button when they were being impatient.
As to my system clock, my last post as viewed from my web browser just now properly showed the date and time that I posted the comment this afternoon: Tue, 01/15/2013 - 14:41
Perhaps it's an issue on your side, though your post time looks correct to me if it was posted about 35 minutes ago.