Inbound email actions

Release version: Yokohama

Updated January 30, 2025

3 minutes to read

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Summary of Inbound Email Actions

Inbound email actions define how the system responds to incoming emails, scripting actions based on specific conditions. These actions function similarly to business rules and are influenced by inbound email flows that take priority over them. The system checks for watermarks to associate emails with tasks, determining the appropriate action based on the conditions met.

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Key Features

Action Types: Inbound email actions can perform two main actions:
- Record action: Sets a value for a field in the target table.
- Email reply: Sends a response back to the original sender.
Email Classification: Incoming emails are classified as forward, reply, or new based on specific criteria, affecting how they are processed.
Attachments: Any attachments in the inbound email are added to the first record generated by the action.
Character Encoding: The system preserves or converts email encodings to ensure compatibility with task records.
Domain Separation: Inbound email actions create records in the domain of the user in the Caller field, ignoring the domain of the action record.

Key Outcomes

Utilizing inbound email actions allows ServiceNow customers to automate responses to incoming emails efficiently, enhance incident management, and ensure accurate record-keeping. By effectively classifying and processing emails, organizations can streamline their workflows and improve customer service interactions. Customers can expect that all processed emails will be marked as 'Processed', regardless of whether a matching action was found.

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.

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.