Certain inbound emails are not visible on the instance due to unsupported character encoding - Support and Troubleshooting

Certain inbound emails are not visible on the instance due to unsupported character encoding Issue  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:

2018-11-02 13:09:28 (004) worker.3 worker.3 WARNING *** WARNING *** Message UID='XXXXXX' Message-ID=' ' - java.io.UnsupportedEncodingException: utf-7 : utf-7 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 the 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 translates to ISO-8859-1 and conforms to the above rules.

Resolution Character encodings supported by ServiceNow are majorly classified in the rules as stated above. Beyond this, if there is any encoding that 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