Email administration
Summarize
Summary of Email Administration
Email administration in ServiceNow allows you to configure email accounts and properties essential for managing inbound and outbound communications. It is crucial for ensuring effective email transmission between your instance and external mail services.
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Key Features
- Email Accounts: Set up accounts to connect to external mail services (POP3, SMTP, IMAP). You can use provided accounts or create custom ones.
- Email Properties: Configure settings that apply universally to all email accounts in your instance.
- Email Size Restrictions: Standard configurations limit emails to approximately 50 MB (including headers, body, and attachments) before encoding. The maximum total size after encoding is 75 MB. Alternate configurations may have different limits; verify with your email administrator.
- Email Service Availability: Email service is disabled on instance clones and is maintained during upgrades to prevent interruptions.
- Instance Communication: Use web services for instance-to-instance email communication and manage email domain security through the Instance Security Center.
Next Steps
After enabling email on your instance, consider the following tasks:
- Test the configuration by routing emails to a single user.
- Review notification categories and templates to ensure they align with your business needs.
- Assess inbound email actions and consider implementing filters to manage incoming messages.
- Establish a retention policy for email archiving and deletion.
- Decide on watermarking for outbound emails and the handling of emails from unrecognized users.
- Set email sending precedence and consider using a spam filter to manage unwanted messages.
All email notifications use the email properties that you define for your instance and the email accounts that you set up. Your email service can also affect the successful transmission of incoming and outgoing email.
Email accounts
Email administrators set up email accounts to allow the system to connect to external mail services such as POP3, SMTP, or IMAP servers. You can use the ServiceNow - provided email accounts or create your own accounts for your own email services.
Email properties
Use Email Properties to configure settings for inbound and outbound email. Email properties apply to all email accounts.
Email service size restrictions
- Standard email configurations – For instances that use the standard email configuration, the ServiceNow mail servers cannot send or receive emails larger than approximately 50 MB (before encoding), including the email header, body text, and attachments. Email messages are encoded by an email client, which increases total email message size. The maximum ServiceNow mail server size restriction is 75 MB (after encoding). The maximum email size limit is enforced regardless of any configured attachment size limits.
- Alternate email configurations – If your email service uses a company-owned or third-party server, the approximate size restriction of 50 MB (including the email header, body text, and attachments) may still apply. However, your service might support different maximum total file sizes for inbound and outbound emails. Check with the email administrator of your email service to verify email size limits.
For details on how encoding can affect email message size and email transmission, see KB0521772.
Email service availability
Email service is intentionally shut down on instance clones to prevent resending already delivered email. Upgrades no longer require an extended interruption of email service. Instances continue to process email during an upgrade. For a possible explanation for undelivered emails, see this blog post by a ServiceNow Technical Support Engineer in the ServiceNow Community.
For instructions on creating and sending custom emails when events on the instance occur, see the tasks in Email and SMS notifications.
Instance-to-instance communication via email
Use Web services to communicate between two instances.
Designate untrusted and trusted email domains
Using Instance Security Center, you can monitor the blocked and allowed incoming email metrics for your instance. For more information, see Designate untrusted and trusted email domains.
Next steps after enabling email
After enabling email on your instance, consider performing several of these important tasks.
- Test the email configuration by routing all email to a single user (set the glide.email.test.user property).
- Review the baseline notification categories, email notifications, and templates to determine if they meet your business needs.
- Review the baseline inbound email actions to determine if they meet your business needs.
- Determine if you want to use email layouts to add consistent content elements.
- Determine if you want to use email filters to restrict the email the instance receives.
- Determine if you want to implement a retention policy to archive and destroy email at certain intervals.
- Determine what kind of watermarks outbound email uses to associate records with email messages.
- Determine if you want to create users when the instance receives an email from an unrecognized user.
- Set the precedence of outgoing mail. By default, the instance sends email with a precedence of bulk (set the glide.smtp.precedence_bulk property).
- Consider preventing untrusted users from triggering inbound actions to prevent unwanted email from affecting your instance.
- Implement a spam filter to restrict unwanted messages sent to your custom email addresses.