Outbound Email ‘Send-Failed’: Recipient Turns Into – How to Fix?

Nikoleta-ChV — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 07:47:06 GMT

I’m working on my company’s developer instance provided by ServiceNow and I’m having trouble with outbound email notifications.

We’re using the ServiceNow-managed SMTP relay, which sends emails using the @Service-Now.com domain. I’ve tried triggering notifications in multiple ways, and while they initially generate correctly (with the send-ready state), they always end up in send-failed.

When I inspect the email headers, I see:

To: false

Even though the Recipients field is populated. The error message is:

Invalid Addresses
504 5.5.2 <false>: Recipient address rejected: need fully-qualified address

I’ve tried:

Sending to fully qualified company emails, as well as Gmail and Hotmail — same result.
Sending to users who are registered in the sys_user table.
Verifying that the Notification Device (cmn_notif_device) is active and configured with the user’s email.

No matter what I try, the recipient becomes <false> when the email actually sends, and the email fails.

Goal:
I need to send email notifications to:

Users not registered in sys_user (external recipients), and
Users who are registered (internal), without the email failing.

Has anyone seen the To: false / <false> recipient issue before?
What could be causing ServiceNow to drop or replace the recipient, and how can I fix or work around this?

question Outbound Email ‘Send-Failed’: Recipient Turns Into <false> – How to Fix? in Community Central forum

Outbound Email ‘Send-Failed’: Recipient Turns Into – How to Fix?