Can we send only SMS ?

[Sanjeev Kumar1]

Hi All,

I need to send only SMS to one group.

So for this we have created an email template but this template also sending an email.

I need to create a notification so that this will send only SMS (Email to sms).

[Ankur Bawiskar]

Hi Sanjeev,

so you want notification to go as a SMS and not email notification for specific group?

Mark Correct if this solves your issue and also mark Helpful if you find my response worthy based on the impact.
Thanks
Ankur

[Jeff Currier]

I am a little confused.  If you are using Email to SMS, then you really are only doing e-mail notifications (on the ServiceNow side) as it is going out as email and getting converted to SMS for the end user.  If this is the case, then don't you just need to limit the addresses to only the SMS email address you want for that group?

Or alternatively, you should just set the email notification to a bogus email address null@example.com and then configure the SMS section of the notification.

[Allen Andreas · Accepted solution]

Hi,

I know exactly what you're talking about with this issue as I had the same problem and resolved it in this manner:

-On the notification, do not set a subject line

-Create business rule with following settings:

So basically, this sends out just the SMS with no additional email going out because the subject line is blank for emails and for the SMS...the text you typed in the notification becomes the subject line (aka now populated) so that comm goes out.

Then going forward in your organization, just ensure you always have a subject line for all other notifications (which you should anyway).

Please mark reply as Helpful/Correct, if applicable. Thanks!

[Matthew Frazier]

Allen,

Your solution was useful for sending SMS notifications without a paired email notification. But unfortunately it also caused an email outage in our instance due to how ServiceNow processes email.

• This business rule will "Abort action" on any insert into sys_email with a blank subject, including received emails
• ServiceNow's email retrieval job does not delete messages from the email server until that message has been saved to an instance.
• ServiceNow's job that retrieves messages from the email server works in batches of 20

In our case, we had this business rule in place for over a year. During that time, users sent several emails to our instance with a blank subject line. Those emails were never retrieved by the ServiceNow instance, so they were not removed from the email server. Finally, we accumulated 20 messages with a blank subject line on the email server. At that point, the email retrieval job would get those 20 messages, fail to insert any of them, and rather than getting a new batch of 20, it would retrieve that same batch of 20 again. Result - No emails were received by the instance.

We made two changes to fix this.

First, we changed the conditions to only run on type='send-ready', so that it would only apply to outbound sys_email records:

Then we also changed the action to set the Type to 'send-ignored', rather than aborting action. That way we retain the record rather than just aborting the insert.

Sharing to prevent others from having a similar outage.