Inbound Email Action Type is not Matched

Overview

An email sent to your ServiceNow instance may not match your Inbound Email Action because the email is a New, Reply, or Forward.

Unexpected matching behavior is often due to misunderstanding the way ServiceNow classifies an email into New, Reply, or Forward types. For more information, see Matching Incoming Email to an Inbound Action Type in the product documentation.

For general information on configuring your inbound action's type and other conditions, see Inbound Email Actions.

Symptoms

When the Inbound Action's type is incorrect, the following symptoms may occur:

• Email sent to your ServiceNow instance does not create a new incident or other record.
• Reply email sent to your ServiceNow instance does not update the expected incident or other record.
• Email is not processed by any inbound action and remains in the Ready state.
• The wrong Inbound Email Action is triggered.
• The email watermark appears to be ignored.
• Forward and Reply inbound actions are not working.
• General problems with Inbound Email Actions.

Troubleshooting

1. Open the email record.
2. Right-click the form header to change the view to Inbox.
3. Review the related log entries. These identify a reason an Inbound Action was skipped. 

Troubleshooting Reply Inbound Actions

As shown in the article in the overview, an email is classified as a reply only if it matches multiple criteria. If your inbound action of type Reply is not matching on an email you expect it to, it is possible your ServiceNow instance has actually classifiied the email as New or Forward because other Reply conditions do not exist in the email. To diagnose, check the following:

1. Open the email record in the Inbox view and review the log entries.
2. Check that the email subject's reply prefix is one of those listed in the glide property, glide.email.reply_subject_prefix.
3. If the email has a watermark (for example, Ref:MSG000001), check that it exists and refers to a record that exists in the same table as your Inbound Action's target table.
4. If the email has a record number in the subject, check that it exists and is in the same table as your Inbound Action's target table.