Inbound email actions

  • Release version: Zurich
  • Updated July 31, 2025
  • 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. They work similarly to business rules, using conditions and scripts to take action on a target table. Inbound email actions are processed after inbound email flows, which take priority. If an email lacks an identifiable watermark, the system attempts to create an incident from the message.

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    Key Features

    • Types of Actions: Inbound email actions can perform record actions (like setting field values) or send email replies back to the sender.
    • Email Classification: Incoming emails are classified into three types:
      • Forward: Identified by forward prefixes in the subject and body.
      • Reply: Recognized by specific watermarks or reply prefixes.
      • New: Emails that do not fit into forward or reply categories.
    • Attachments: Any attachments in inbound emails are added to the first record produced by the action.
    • Character Encoding: Supports ASCII-7 and UTF-8 encoding while attempting conversion for other encodings.
    • Domain Separation: The system ignores the domain of the inbound email action record when creating records, ensuring incidents are created in the user's domain.

    Key Outcomes

    By utilizing inbound email actions, ServiceNow customers can streamline email handling by automating responses and record creation based on incoming emails. This enhances operational efficiency and ensures accurate incident management, allowing for timely responses to user inquiries.

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

    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.