Can we set up Automatic Email Replies for off-domain emails?

[Drew Dennis]

Following the doc (https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/sandiego-servicenow-platform/page/administer/notification/concept/c_InboundEmailActions.html) we have added a new Inbound Action that I thought would apply to all incoming emails from an accepted domain.  We set the order right before the generic "Create INC" inbound action for our instance so it won't apply to the robo-alert emails and such earlier in the Order, and on initial  testing it worked like a charm.  Unfortunately when tested with an off-company account it failed.  We DO have the Domains the emails we expect to be coming from Allowed in System Properties > Email Properties > Inbound Email Configuration, but it still failed.  INCs are being created but the new Action failes stating:  "Reply Email not sent for 'INC Creation Confirmation ', empty user_id".

That's the point of the though.  It's just a courtesy notice that the INC queue is not monitored between the hours of X and Y.  Please call Z.

Is there a way to set this up so that emails not associated to sys_user.list will still trigger the Action and send the email?  I attempted to set up a User with a 2nd email account and SN only allows 1 email to be assigned to a User from what I can find.  What's the best way to accomplish our goal?

[ryan_pope]

Just for clarification, is the point to allow the emails to come in (and create incidents still), or to outright reject further processing of the external domain emails, and instead send a "bounce back" email to that email address? And are those emails coming from external domains truly coming from your users (just a different address), or from 3rd parties?

[ryan_pope]

And somewhat tangential: I believe a user CAN have a second email address as a communication channel. If you go to the cmn_notif_device table, you'll see user preferences for how they are notified from SN. They can set additional channels (like another email address) by going to "personal settings" (gear in top right of native interface), Create Channel, and add a secondary email address to their notification devices.

[Drew Dennis]

Correct, we are aiming to both send an email reply and to create an INC to be worked.  Another company was acquired and it may be months before they are fully absorbed (domain, exchange, payroll, etc.) but they should still be able to submit tickets requesting support in the meantime.  

[ryan_pope]

Got it. So if the issue is that the incidents are being created, no problem, but it's struggling to get an auto-response email from the inbound action, I would suggest utilizing an event to trigger that follow-up message. This would allow you a bit more flexibility in the recipient of the outbound email. I would suggest that after the "current.insert();" line in the inbound action script, you add something along the lines of:

gs.eventQueue('[name of an event you create on the sysevent_register table]',current,email.origemail); 

 You'll also need to create the event that gets called in that eventQueue line on the sysevent_register table, and likely also set up a notification that triggers based on that event.

For additional visibility, if you have your incident notifications also being sent to folks in the Watch List of the incident, you should be able to also append that email address (stored in email.origemail) to the Watch List (even if they aren't an existing user).