question Re: Strip Email Attachments Inbound Action in Developer forum

Strip Email Attachments Inbound Action

wmahmud1 — Tue, 27 Jan 2015 19:45:25 GMT

Hello -

I am trying to strip all attachments that get picked up by ServiceNow under 5000 bytes so we can avoid unecessary attachments of users signatures to records.

I have looked at some examples posted already and setup something similar. My issue is, the business rule on the sys_attachment table seems to run as I can see the script log showing the name of the file being aborted, but the email log itself, is not capturing the target (remains as empty) and not communicating back to the record. If i turn off this busienss rule, it works fine again.

Any ideas what the issue may be?

(see attached business rule detail)

Re: Strip Email Attachments Inbound Action

poyntzj — Tue, 27 Jan 2015 19:59:29 GMT

I found this, or the starters for this on here somewhere, but we have this

in sys_attachment, create a Before Insert Business rule

The condition is

parseInt(current.size_bytes) <= 1800 && current.content_type.toLowerCase().indexOf('image') != -1 && current.table_name.toLowerCase().indexOf('zz_yy') == -1 && current.table_name.toLowerCase() != 'sys_email'

and the script of

current.setAbortAction(true);


//gs.log(current.file_name + ' : insert aborted');

Cheers

Re: Strip Email Attachments Inbound Action

poyntzj — Tue, 27 Jan 2015 20:01:03 GMT

And yours has parseINT when it should be parseInt

Your routine will kill any small file, the one I have limits it to image files only.

Cheers

Re: Strip Email Attachments Inbound Action

wmahmud1 — Tue, 27 Jan 2015 20:28:11 GMT

Thank you Julian — looks like ParseInt was the issue (in another example I saw it as ParseINT).

Re: Strip Email Attachments Inbound Action

Nickels — Thu, 29 Jan 2015 22:48:09 GMT

Thank you for posting this. I was looking at stripping the images based on the file names but I was worried about removing a needed attachment.

Re: Strip Email Attachments Inbound Action

poyntzj — Fri, 30 Jan 2015 09:46:41 GMT

If you want to be sure, look at the sys_attachment table and using the graphics types look at the typical sizes.

from there you can gauge the normal sizes and change to the code to cover it.

A lot of the attached images are called image???.??? so you could add that as part of the condition

Only feedback we have had is positive as sometimes an engineer would look at a ticket that has had a lot of correspondence and find a lot of image attachments. This could take a while to locate the relevant image / document they were after. Now, all the image attachments are gone it is far easier

Re: Strip Email Attachments Inbound Action

Nickels — Wed, 04 Feb 2015 16:17:24 GMT

I found that I had to remove the last part of the condition in my instance to make this work. .

&& current.table_name.toLowerCase() != 'sys_email'

If I leave that one there, it still attaches the images from the signature. If I remove it, it acts as expected.

I am wondering if I am creating an type of issue by removing it.

-Chris

Re: Strip Email Attachments Inbound Action

poyntzj — Wed, 04 Feb 2015 16:26:31 GMT

to restrict the option to emails.

Re: Strip Email Attachments Inbound Action

scottatah — Wed, 25 Feb 2015 21:49:59 GMT

I'm encountering the same issue as Chris above. Can someone explain why the process is failing with this line of code or what I'm misunderstanding?

I read it as "only strip attachments when the table name is not sys_email". When I look at the sys_attachment table, there's only a few that show a table_name of sys_email. I would have thought an attachment appearing on "new_call" for example would have been stripped with this line in the code, but that is not the case.. Incidentally, if I change it to == 'sys_email' the BR works properly. I must be misunderstanding something, I just don't know what.

current.table_name.toLowerCase() != 'sys_email'

Re: Strip Email Attachments Inbound Action

poyntzj — Thu, 26 Feb 2015 10:19:54 GMT

Hi Scott, yes you are correct. I typed that line wrong.

it should be

&& current.table_name.toLowerCase() == 'sys_email'

to process just email attachments

Re: Strip Email Attachments Inbound Action

Dub Myers — Wed, 20 Sep 2017 23:31:48 GMT

Though this is an older post, in case anyone runs across this looking for a solution, there is a new feature in Jakarta that allows a bit more control over what happens to inline image attachments on an inbound email. This is oriented toward handling small attachments typical of logos or signature images.

See the Jakarta docs here.

This is a basic byte-size based filter with the ability to dictate what happens to any attachment when less than the byte size

AttachTarget - does what most are used to today - associates the attachment to the target record.

AttachEmail - associates the attachment with the sys_email record.

AttachNone - leaves the attachment orphaned and unattached to any target record. (Allows "Preview Email' to still show the inline image.)

Why no "Delete" action? If you don't store the attachment, then the "Preview Email" pane will show a broken link because there is no more image to reference. Use AttachNone.

Re: Strip Email Attachments Inbound Action

Allen Andreas — Wed, 14 Mar 2018 13:55:35 GMT

Hmm...I've tried to use this and set the minimum to 39000 bytes aka 39KB and we still have images getting through that are like 3KB.

Pretty frustrating.

If anyone has anything else that can work, please let me know!

Thanks!

Re: Strip Email Attachments Inbound Action

Dub Myers — Tue, 15 May 2018 22:52:10 GMT

Did you get this to work eventually?

It sounds like you already tried this, but one interesting item is that AttachTarget is the default value of the 'glide.email.inbound.image_sys_attachment.filter.action' property. That means if you set the 'glide.email.inbound.image_sys_attachment.filter.minimum_bytes' property only, the default action will still be to attach it to the target record. Both need to be set to make it work.

For the attachment that made it through unexpectedly, you are saying this, correct?

You are on Jakarta or later?

'glide.email.inbound.image_sys_attachment.filter.action' is "AttachNone"?

'glide.email.inbound.image_sys_attachment.filter.minimum_bytes' is 39000?

The one that made it through unexpectedly:

sys_attachment.size_bytes is ~3000 bytes?

sys_attachment.content_type starts with "image" (e.g. 'image/png', 'image/jpg', etc)?

Barring other business rule customizations interacting here, if those are your conditions, and it is not behaving as expected, I'd open an incident with ServiceNow support to see what is going on.

Re: Strip Email Attachments Inbound Action

Carl Fransen1 — Tue, 15 May 2018 23:21:14 GMT

Hi,

I have been using the below for months in production and it works a treat - we use this to remove all the email signature logo's (we have over 9 on our standard signature).

Created a Business rule - ADVANCED, BEFORE, INSERT

Condition: parseInt(current.size_bytes) <= 5000

Script:

//  code added to check email attachments and remove if the size is equal or less than that specified in the condition
//  CJF 5/4/17 - Post MVP Incident Go-Live
//  CJF 17/4/18 - Updated to remove new HR Email Banner pictures from new templates

(function executeRule(current, previous /*null when async*/) {
 
  var email_log = new GlideRecord('syslog');
  var email = new GlideRecord('sys_email');
  email.addQuery('instance',current.table_sys_id);
  email.orderByDesc('sys_created_on');
  email.query();
  var email_sys_id ='';
  var email_text = '';
  var imagename = current.file_name;
  if(email.next())
      {
      email_sys_id = email.sys_id;
  }
  email_text = 'EMAIL'+'.'+email_sys_id;
  email_log.addQuery('source','CONTAINS', email_text);
  email_log.addQuery('message','CONTAINS',imagename);
  email_log.query();
  if(email_log.next())
  {
     current.setAbortAction(true);
  }
 
})(current, previous);

I hope this helps

Cheers Carl.

...please mark correct or helpful where appropriate

Re: Strip Email Attachments Inbound Action

brianlan25 — Wed, 16 May 2018 14:54:38 GMT

Did you find a solution that worked?

Re: Strip Email Attachments Inbound Action

Carl Fransen1 — Wed, 16 May 2018 18:56:04 GMT

my solution works... 🙂

Re: Strip Email Attachments Inbound Action

brianlan25 — Wed, 16 May 2018 19:51:38 GMT

unfortunately the images in our email signatures are larger then 5000 and doing some testing increasing the size bigger then that could cause legitimate screenshots from being attached.

Re: Strip Email Attachments Inbound Action

Carl Fransen1 — Wed, 16 May 2018 19:58:33 GMT

What I did to get around that is to add specific OR queries to the condition as I found the signature images are all exactly the same size and I have been able to specifically remove thos, see below for full condition string:

parseInt(current.size_bytes) <= 5000 || parseInt(current.size_bytes) == 27591 || parseInt(current.size_bytes) == 29272 || parseInt(current.size_bytes) == 29251

What I also found was that the size was the 'size on disk', not the 'file size' when you right-click and look at the properties of the file to gain the exact size.

Hope this helps.

Re: Strip Email Attachments Inbound Action

AndyB5000 — Mon, 17 Sep 2018 12:53:41 GMT

Hi Carl,

I found this works great, however, we have customers that send thing in text documents and in some cases are under the size of the signature attachments. Any thoughts on how to suppress the sig attachments but allow others through?

thanks.

Re: Strip Email Attachments Inbound Action

Carl Fransen1 — Mon, 17 Sep 2018 18:44:47 GMT

We don't have smaller files being attached so it's not an issue for us. When we tested our code initially we used things like a blank word document - which was 19KB, well over the 5000 bytes on our condition, and we did the same testing with images and other file types. We also looked in the images inside ServiceNow to determine what is being sent and our 5000 bytes covered all of our requirements.

You could look at saving all your signature files to images, finding the exact size as I mentioned to Brian in another one of my posts and then specifically excluding these in your condition - as below:

parseInt(current.size_bytes) <= 5000 || parseInt(current.size_bytes) == 27591 || parseInt(current.size_bytes) == 29272 || parseInt(current.size_bytes) == 29251

What I also found was that the size was the 'size on disk', not the 'file size' when you right-click and look at the properties of the file to gain the exact size.

Hope this helps.

Carl.