question Re: How to test email notifications? in Developer forum

How to test email notifications?

jamesmcwhinney — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 16:28:52 GMT

We will have a number of testers in the test system at the same time next week and would like them to be able to see the email notifications generated by the system so that they can ensure the notifications were sent to the right people with the right content etc.

The problem is that we don't want to send any emails to users outside the testing team (which could easily happen due to some of our workflows).

Ideally, I would like to set up ServiceNow to forward all emails to the testing team. The trouble with this is that the original email address is not preserved, so there is no way of knowing who the actual intended recipient was.

I was hoping I could modify the notification templates to include the original email address, but it seems that is not possible.

Any suggestions on how this could be easily achieved?

Re: How to test email notifications?

coryseering — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 16:37:17 GMT

Hi James,

The override for the email address occurs at the time the mail is *sent*. It gets inserted into the sys_email table with the correct addresses.

I'd put a before-insert business rule on sys_email which just appends the recipients (and CC and BCC lists, if they exist) to the body of the email. Don't change the recipients- the system will do that when the message is picked up to be sent (assuming you have set an override testing email address). Just copy them into the body.

Re: How to test email notifications?

manikorada — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 16:44:07 GMT

There is a property 'glide.email.test.user' in which you can give the emails to comma separated values of the emails to which the emails needs to go. http://wiki.servicenow.com/index.php?title=Email_Properties#Outbound_Mail_Configuration

Also, you can create a group and add all the testers to that group and update the property

Re: How to test email notifications?

Uncle Rob — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 16:46:02 GMT

Hey James,

This is something I've attempted to solve a number of times over the years. My lowest friction solution is to get rid of "forward all email here" and instead simply ask each outbound email if they're sending to an "authorized" person. How do we control authorization? By a new property on the group table.

Net effect: You can decide who gets sub-prod notifications or not, and those people receive ONLY the notifications they were targeted to receive. OOB you can only get everything or get nothing.

You can see the full solution on a blog I wrote here:

Use Sub-Production Notifications Like a Boss

Re: How to test email notifications?

Uncle Rob — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 16:46:37 GMT

I know its the only thing available OOB, but its terrible. It sends ALL email to those addresses, not just the emails targeted to them.

Re: How to test email notifications?

jamesmcwhinney — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 18:13:31 GMT

Thank you so much!!!

That is exactly what I needed.

I created an insert business rule against the Emails [sys_email] table with the following in the advanced script:

function onBefore(current, previous) {

//This function will be automatically called when this rule is processed.

current.body = "<H2>This email originally intended for (To: " + current.recipients + ") (Cc: " + current.blind_copy + ")</H2><HR>" + current.body;

}