Inbound email actions

Release version: Australia

Updated March 12, 2026

3 minutes to read

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Summary of Inbound Email Actions

Inbound email actions allow you to define how your ServiceNow system responds to incoming emails. These actions can either create or update records based on the contents of the email, using conditions and scripts similar to business rules. Inbound email flows take precedence over these actions, meaning they are processed first if triggers are present.

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Key Features

Action Types: Inbound email actions can perform two types of actions:
- Record Action: Updates a field in the target table.
- Email Reply: Sends a response to the sender.
Email Classification: Incoming emails are categorized as Forward, Reply, or New based on specific criteria, determining how they will be processed.
Attachments: Any attachments in the email are added to the first record generated by the action.
Character Encoding: Supports various encodings, ensuring that content is preserved or converted appropriately.
Domain Separation: Records created by inbound email actions are not constrained by domain, ensuring the incident is created in the domain of the user specified in the Caller field.

Key Outcomes

By configuring inbound email actions, you can automate the handling of incoming emails, ensuring that relevant tasks are created or updated efficiently. This streamlines communication and enhances the responsiveness of your ServiceNow environment. Proper classification of emails leads to accurate processing, while attachment handling and character encoding support ensure that all information is preserved correctly.

Define an inbound email action to script how the system responds to an inbound email.

Note:

Inbound email flows take priority over inbound email actions. If you create flows with inbound email triggers, emails are first processed by the inbound email triggers before they are processed by inbound email actions.

Inbound email actions are similar to business rules: both use conditions and scripts that take action on a target table. An inbound email action checks the email for a watermark that associates it with a task and checks for other conditions. If the conditions are met, the system takes the inbound email action that you configure. The system can take two types of actions:

Record action: setting a value for a field in the target table.
Email reply: sending an email back to the source that triggered the action.

By default, if an email has no identifiable watermark, an inbound email action attempts to create an incident from the message. If the email has a watermark of an existing incident, an inbound email action updates the existing incident according to the action's script.

Inbound email receive types

The system classifies all incoming email into one of three types: forward, reply, or new.

Table 1. Inbound action classifications
Order	Type	Criteria
1	Forward	The system classifies an email as a forward only when it meets all these criteria: The subject line contains a recognized forward prefix such as FW:. The email body contains a recognized forward string such as From:. The system classifies any email that meets these criteria as a forward, even if the message contains a watermark or record number that otherwise classifies it as a reply.
2	Reply	The system classifies an email as a reply when it fails to match it to the forward receive type and it meets any one of these criteria: The subject line or email body contains a recognized watermark such as Ref:MSG0000008. There is no watermark and the subject line contains a recognized reply prefix such as RE: and a recognized record number such as INC0005574 There is no watermark and the Reply-To header contains a recognized message ID of an email with watermark. If an email does not meet any of the previous criteria, the system checks the email header for a thread-index. When a thread-index is present, the system classifies the email as a reply and associates it with the relevant conversation or thread view. This functionality is supported only for emails originating from Microsoft Outlook. Note: To enable thread indexing, create the system property glide.inbound.email.classify.by.thread_index and set it to true.
3	New	The system classifies an email as new when it fails to match it to the forward and reply receive types.

Note:

From Paris release and beyond, if an email body has multiple watermarks, the last watermark in the email body is considered.

Flowchart showing how the system determines the type of incoming email as forward, reply, or new — Figure 1. Determining the type of incoming email

Attachments

If an inbound email contains one or more email attachments, the inbound email action adds the attachments to the first record the action produces.

Character encoding

If the email encoding is ASCII-7 or UTF-8, inbound email actions preserve the character encoding in any associated task records they produce.
If the email encoding is ISO-8859-1, the inbound email action attempts to convert the email to Windows 1252.
Inbound email actions convert any other encodings (for example, Mac OS Roman) to plain text, which may or may not be readable.

See the System email log and mailboxes for examples of what you might see if a notification or inbound email action is not processed.

Note:

The state of all incoming emails that have been run against inbound email actions, even if there is no matching action, is changed to Processed.

Domain separation

The system ignores the domain that the inbound email action record is in when it creates a record based on the inbound email action. Keep inbound actions in the global domain. For example, if your inbound email action creates an incident, the system creates the incident in the same domain as the user in the Caller field. If that user is not in the User [sys_user] table, the incident is in the global domain.