Symptoms
Inbound Emails from certain users are not processed by the ServiceNow instance. These emails are not recognized by the system and even do not show up in the sys_email table.
When seeing in the email logs, we can see java.io.UnsupportedEncodingException, corresponding to the message ID.
Example entry in the logs:
Release
Valid for all releases
Cause
This happens, because the character encoding of the inbound email is not supported by the instance.
ServiceNow Product Documentation page mentions following -
- 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.
If the user is using Western European ISO encoding, which by default is present in MS Outlook, then it translate to ISO-8859-1 and conforms to above rules.
Resolution
Character encodings supported by ServiceNow are majorly classified in the rules as stated above. Beyond this, if there is any encoding which is not supported by Java, then it will not be supported by ServiceNow.
Here is the link to all the encodings supported by Java, which might be referred to when checking for any other encoding besides UTF - 8 / ISO-8859-1.
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/technotes/guides/intl/encoding.doc.html