What is the difference between email and email log

[Dave65]

What is the difference between email and email log tables?

Also, why do they have a different number of records?

Thank you for your help.

[Sagar Pagar]

Hi @Dave65,

As per my understanding, in baseline system we have only Email logs table. It stores the system email log records all emails that the instance creates or receives.

For reference- System email log and mailboxes 

Thanks,
Sagar Pagar

[Dave65]

Hi Sagar
I am referring to 2 different tables; sys_email is the table your link talks about. The other table I am asking about is the sys_email_log table.

[Dave65]

Hi Musab

I am not able to get to your links which I guess are in your PDI.

I don't think you are correct about what is in the sys_email_log table based on the following I found in the docs (there is not a lot of information in the docs about this)
https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/sandiego-platform-administration/page/administer/platform-perform... 

Email

The email log can help you determine whether the system is sending emails, who they're going to, and the format of the message itself. The email log also shows all inbound email. To see the email log, navigate to System Logs > Email Log.

From this description, it seems like both tables should have the same information so I don't understand why they have a different number of emails except that maybe like the watermark (sys_watermark) table, it only logs emails that were actually sent and not those that did not get sent for some reason.
In the sys_email table you can see which emails were sent and which were ignored or skipped and they don't show in the sys_watermark table.

[Musab Rasheed]

What I have written in reply is correct per my understanding, both are different table and don't get confused with Table names in Doc and Instance.