Inbound Email Action Target Table - Support and Troubleshooting

Inbound Email Action Target Table Issue  An email sent to your ServiceNow instance may not match up with a record that you expect it to. The Inbound Email Action's target table, along with the presence of a watermark or a record number in the email, affects whether your Inbound Email Action will match against this email.

For details on configuring your inbound action's target table and other conditions, as well as on how ServiceNow searches the email for watermarks or records, see Inbound Email Actions .

Cause When a target table 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 log shows Skipping , email is a reply, and the record it matches is not in the Inbound Email Action's table Email not processed by any inbound action and remains in the Ready state General problems with Inbound Email Actions. Resolution ServiceNow logs information about the record table or watermark that may help you diagnose a problem related to target table mismatches. For more information, see Ensuring Email is not Ignored .

To change the Inbound Email Action's target table:

Open the Inbound Email Action record. Chose a table from the Target Table menu. Watermarks When a watermark is present in a reply email, ServiceNow looks up the record associated with the watermark to find its table. In order for your inbound action to match the email, the record's table must match the Inbound Email Action's target table.

For instance, if an email contains Ref:MSG000001 , and it is associated with incident record INT1234567, then your Inbound Email Action's target table must be incident in order for it to match against this email.

Record Numbers

When there is no watermark, but a record number is present in a reply email's subject, ServiceNow looks up the record to find its table. In order for your inbound action to match the email, the record's table must match the Inbound Email Action's target table.

For instance, if the email subject is Re: CHG0000001 , then your Inbound Email Action's target table must be change in order for it to match against this email.

The base system inbound action Update Approval Request is defined to match for records that belong to the [sysapprover_approval] table. It matches only if the record found through the watermark or record number belongs to this table.

If the watermark cannot be found in the reply email, then the system looks for a record number. If the subject were "RE: Please approve CHG123456", then the located record belongs to the Change table. Therefore, the message logged for this inbound action would be:

Skipping 'Update Approval Request', email is a reply, and the record it matches is not in the Inbound Email Action's table

This demonstrates the importance of watermarks in matching, particularly if record numbers from other tables are present in the email.

Related Links Inbound Email Action does not run on the email record with the error - Skipping 'Name_Of_Inbound_Action', a suitable GlideRecord not found