Just 1 email record created from an email sent to 4 different e-mail accounts (IMAP)

[Dominik von Fi1]

Hi all,

I have the following use case:

Preconditions:

• 4 e-mail accounts IMAP are set up for email receiving
• Inbound Email Flow is running and creates Cases from Inbound emails sent to one of the e-mail accounts

Use case:

• The same e-mail is sent to all 4 e-mail accounts simultaneously
• From each email record, the inbound email flow is triggered separately

Expected behaviour:

• For each e-mail sent to each account, there is one e-mail record in the sys_email table

Observed behaviour:

• Just one e-mail record is generated, which contains all 4 recipients
• Inbound email flow is triggered, with a "for each" loop it is possible to create 4 cases, but as only one case can be the target of the email record, only one case contains all the information from the email

Can somebody explain why just 1 email is received and not 4 separately? I mean the mail is sent to 4 different email accounts?

Thank you

[jMarshal]

The only thing that I can imagine is that this is a "bug" (with the inbound email flow) that is seeing each email as an "update" of the same one.

To fix this yourself, if there's a way to slightly identify each email as "unique", that would fix this...meaning whatever external thing is triggering the email, if it can send different emails to each address instead of an exact copy to 4 different addresses, then this will just work with the Now Platform without any additional configurations (you should get 4 separate cases, each a "copy" of each other, essentially -- which seems to be your desired outcome).

I'm not super familiar with the email flow feature (I use the "older" inbound email actions). I would recommend opening a case with HI if this goes unanswered beyond what I've said here. Hope this helps!

[Dominik von Fi1]

Hi James,

it doesn't seem to have something to do with the inbound email flow itself. I just deactivated the flow and sent an email again to the 4 e-mail accounts.

As you can see, again, the instance only created 1 e-mail record on the sys_email table:

[shloke04]

Hi,

These type of situation has happened to me in my earlier project and we logged a Case with ServiceNow Support team and the resolution provided in this scenario was as below:

1) Check in your Lower prod instance or any other instance where these 4 different Email Accounts are configured.

2) It might be possible those emails are getting received in any other instance of yours which was exactly happening for us.

Refer to HI article below:

https://support.servicenow.com/kb?id=kb_article_view&sysparm_article=KB0855909

https://support.servicenow.com/kb?id=kb_article_view&sysparm_article=KB0520595

Hope this helps. Please mark the answer as correct/helpful based on impact.

Regards,
Shloke

[Dominik von Fi1 · Accepted solution]

Hi all, I opened a case and the SNOW support said that this was expected behaviour:

This is an expected behaviour as you are sending the same email to 4 different addresses, the instance interprets this as the same message 4 times hence it ignores and silently drops the rest of the emails after grabbing the first one.