Incident Update Inbound action query

[InnusMulani]

Hi

We are working in a domain separated environment with multiple domains. Most of our users are shared resources, meaning they have multiple user profiles (one per domain) but use the same email address for each profile.

Issue:

• When such a user replies to a system-generated email (with a watermark)  the user_id attribute in sys_email table is picked randomly based on the sender’s email.

• As a result, the target record is not always updated with comments in incident table because the chosen user_id may belong to another domain where it does not have access to the Incident table.

• This causes the incident comments not to be updated.

What we tried:

1. Created a duplicate of the Update Incident (BP) inbound action and modified the script.

2. This did not resolve the issue.

3. As a workaround, we disabled the inbound action and wrote a custom before business rule to set the user_id and Target attributes and few other field based on the incident.sys_domain.

Question:
Since the inbound action was disabled globally (across all domains), will this have any negative impact on other processes or inbound email handling in the system? Has anyone faced a similar situation and found a better approach?

[kaushal_snow]

Hi @InnusMulani ,

1. Yes, potentially. The Update Incident inbound action is part of the default inbound email processing in ServiceNow. If you disable it globally, other email replies intended to update incidents (in any domain) will no longer be processed using the standard logic. Unless fully accounted for in your custom rule, you risk missing updates or comments across the system....

2. Why is the email "user_id" chosen randomly?

Domain separation and duplicate email addresses cause this confusion. ServiceNow matches the sender's email address to a user record, but when multiple user records share the same email across different domains, the system may pick any one it essentially picks the first match it finds—leading to unpredictable behavior and mismatches....

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