Prior to New York release, when an inbound email (of Reply type) has been processed to skip all active inbound email actions system will keep the [Target] field as empty as no existing record would be associated with this inbound email as shown in below screenshot.

In the email log entry, we can see all the email inbound actions are skipped as below.

However starting in New York release, the log entry has changed to below and users can see the record being associated to the [Target] field even there is no matching inbound actions run for this email.

Below screenshot shows the corresponding record has been linked to the [Target] field of this inbound email.

This is not understandable behavior for most of users as the email skipped all inbound email actions and the [Target] should be left as empty.

This behavior starts to change from New York release.

The root cause is starting from New York release, ServiceNow introduced a new function called Inbound Email Triggers for Flow Designer.

With this new feature all emails are firstly processed by the Inbound Email Triggers before they are processed by Inbound Email Actions.

This is the reason why target record is still being associated with the inbound email even there is no matching inbound email actions.

In the email log, users can observe one more log entry as below.

To keep the previous behavior of inbound email processing, please follow below steps to disable the Inbound Email Triggers on the New York based instance.

1. Navigate to sys_properties.LIST table

2. Create below system property (if not existing) and set value to false

Property Name: glide.email.inbound.email_flow_trigger_enabled

Type: true | false

Value: false

3. Save