Outbound Email/Notifications FAQThis page addresses frequently asked questions related to ServiceNow outbound email notifications and provides additional resources to help you resolve them. Review the three most common questions and their answers in the video below, or jump to a specific question by clicking on it in the table of contents below to learn more. Table of Contents 1. Why wasn't a notification triggered? Or, why didn't a particular user receive a notification?2. Does ServiceNow use Forced TLS or Opportunistic TLS when sending email?3. I think that ServiceNow may have sent duplicate email to one of our users. How do I confirm this?4. Why is my notification marked as send-ignored?5. The notification's preview content does not match what a user sees in their email client. Why?6. Is it possible to increase the outbound email attachment limit? If so, what size limit would you recommend?7. How many email messages can my instance send at one time? How long does it take for the emails sent by the instance to reach users?8. Email from ServiceNow is being blocked by our environment. We would like to trust all ServiceNow email. How do we do this?9. What is the difference between notifications with the Subscribable field checked and those with the Subscribable field not checked?10. I want notifications to go to "CC" or "BCC" instead of "To." Is this supported?11. Is it possible to determine which of the emails sent by the instance were sent using the email client feature?12. Users are getting HTML markup in the body of the messages they receive from the instance. How do we prevent this?13. How do I set up a notification for records, such as incidents, that have not been updated in a specific amount of time?14. Is it possible to change the style of comments when they appear in outbound email (email notifications)?15. What is the "Send to Event Creator" option for in Notifications?16. Will an Email Notification with "Send When" set as "Event is fired" always trigger if the event is created, regardless of the table? 1. Why wasn't a notification triggered? Or, why didn't a particular user receive a notification? There are multiple ways to troubleshoot email notifications not sending or users not receiving email notifications. Please see the following resources for the best sets of instructions to troubleshoot these types of issues: KB0679999 - Notification does not trigger and create email KB0538135 - Troubleshooting email notification failures in ServiceNow 2. Does ServiceNow use Forced TLS or Opportunistic TLS when sending email? From November 2022, all new customer instances have been configured to use TLS to protect the SMTP connection from the customer's instance to the outbound ServiceNow email servers. Older instances can be upgraded to SMTP STARTTLS for outbound mail by re-running "email provisioning". From the ServiceNow email infrastructure to the Internet, Opportunistic TLS (STARTTLS) is used when the ServiceNow internal mail infrastructure initiates a connection with your external email server. This means TLS will be used only if your mail server supports TLS for encryption. Since these are email infrastructure level configurations, for ServiceNow-configured email accounts in an instance, values pertaining to the connection (SSL/TLS, host, port...) are not editable. If, for policy reasons, a customer wishes to absolutely require enforced TLS to receive email, this can be done by requiring TLS for inbound connections to their email servers. If the receiving mail system insists upon (requires) TLS, the ServiceNow mail servers will honor this request. THIS IS NOT RECOMMENDED. NOTE 1: This specifically violates RFC 3207: "A publicly-referenced SMTP server MUST NOT require use of the STARTTLS extension in order to deliver mail locally." However, some customers may choose to do this at their own risk. NOTE 2: If your server requires TLS to receive email, and your mail server fails to properly negotiate TLS, then mail will not be delivered. Customers must configure their mail system carefully to match current Internet TLS standards and protocols as well as periodically update them as recommended protocols and ciphers may change without notice. Customers may also bypass the ServiceNow mail infrastructure and deliver mail directly from the instance to their mail server. This is controlled by the SMTP Sender setting in the instance. You can use the information in KB0743094 to confirm ServiceNow email server is using Opportunistic TLS. 3. I think that ServiceNow may have sent duplicate email to one of our users. How do I confirm this? The message ID is generated as unique for each email message in the system, and is shown inside the email header. If the emails look exactly the same but have different message IDs, the messages are duplicates created by the sending server, where the email was generated. If the message IDs are the same, there was no duplicate email sent, but the email server receiving and delivering the message has delivered the exact same message more than once. For more information see KB0529413 - Troubleshooting duplicate emails generated by the instance. 4. Why is my notification marked as send-ignored? There are a few reasons notifications may be marked as send-ignored as this status is meant for the SMTPSender to purposely not send some notifications. Some of these reasons include: Notifications may be marked as send-ignored when two different notifications are generating form incident tables for the same user. In the notification, there is a weight field. The notification with higher weight takes precedence and is executed, and the other notifications are ignored. Set the weight to 0 for both of the notifications to receive both emails.Notifications are sometimes marked as send-ignored when an email notification is generated but has no valid recipients based on its notification definition. For instance, an email that would be sent to the assigned_to user from an incident cannot be sent because the incident is not assigned to anyone. For more information on ensuring valid recipients are available, see KB0679999. ServiceNow filters out emails which have the same body as other emails. This stems from a similar event for the purposes of preventing redundancy. If you have two notifications that contain the same body, trigger from the same event, and are going to the same set of recipients, one of the notifications will be marked as send-ignored to prevent the notification being sent twice. 5. The notification's preview content does not match what a user sees in their email client. Why? When designing notification email content, you can use Notification Preview to get an idea of what the email will look like to a recipient; however, please note that various email applications and web browsers may render the same HTML code differently. For more information, see KB0747524 - Email Preview looks different than in Outlook, Gmail or other Mail Application 6. Is it possible to increase the outbound email attachment limit? If so, what size limit would you recommend? When encountering the outbound email attachment limit, there is no workaround if using the ServiceNow email servers. You must either send smaller emails (fewer attachments, smaller email body, etc), or employ your own email infrastructure that supports larger emails. If using your own separate email infrastructure instead of ServiceNow's, the outbound email attachment limit issue can exist; however, the size limit values for inbound and outbound may be different, as well as the error code reported. Consult your system's email administrator if you encounter this error. For more information, see KB0521772 - Email server size limit prevents emails from being sent or received 7. How many email messages can my instance send at one time? How long does it take for the emails sent by the instance to reach users? This KB article goes into detail about email volume: KB0952320 - ServiceNow Instance Email Delivery and Volume SLA Note specifically that the ServiceNow mail system is intended solely for sending notifications. It is not to be used for marketing, mass mailing or other non-notification purposes. 8. Email from ServiceNow is being blocked by our environment. We would like to trust all ServiceNow email. How do we do this? ServiceNow provides SPF records, which can be used to identify expected sources for emails. ServiceNow also support DKIM signing and DMARC policies. For more information, please see KB0535456 - Enabling email delivery using SPF records to allow SN mail servers. 9. What is the difference between notifications with the Subscribable field checked and those with the Subscribable field not checked? A subscribable notification has its subscribable field checked and is known as a "Personal Notification." This allows a user to self-subscribe to an admin-defined notification. Regular notifications do not have this check box set, which means the admin assigns which users get the notification. For more information, see KB0621465 - Behavior of Personal Notifications (Subscribable) and regular notification (non-Subscribable) in Notification Preferences 10. I want notifications to go to "CC" or "BCC" instead of "To." Is this supported? Yes, notifications can go to CC or BCC instead of To, but you will have to do this via a notification script. See examples in the Example scripting for email notifications documentation. Note that you will not receive these notifications if you are temporarily forwarding all email to one email address. For more information, see KB0783517 - Adding CC and BCC to notification is not working. 11. Is it possible to determine which of the emails sent by the instance were sent using the email client feature? Emails which are created from the email client contain the email header X-ServiceNow-Source: EmailClient. For more information, see KB0745172 - Identifying the source of an email sent from ServiceNow 12. Users are getting HTML markup in the body of the messages they receive from the instance. How do we prevent this? The "Message HTML" field in the Notification record has two modes. By default, you get an HTML editor that hides all HTML code from you. In this mode you should enter the content as you wish users to see it. If you want to enter HTML markup, you can switch to HTML mode by clicking the <> icon. For more information, see the Edit HTML content in an email notification product documentation. 13. How do I set up a notification for records, such as incidents, that have not been updated in a specific amount of time? You can set up notifications for records by using the inactivity monitor in conjunction with notifications. See full instructions at KB0823990 - How to Create a Notification for an Inactivity Monitor. 14. Is it possible to change the style of comments when they appear in outbound email (email notifications)? It's not possible to change the style of comments in outbound email notifications in a base system (out of box) instance, but this can be done with some customization. For more information on this customization, see KB1000934 - Is it possible to change the style of comments when they appear in outbound email (Email Notifications)?. 15. What is the "Send to Event Creator" option for in Notifications? The Send to Event Creator option, when unchecked, will ensure the email will not be sent to the event creator if the user is part of the recipients list. The Business Logic behind this functionality is that users may not need to be notified of the actions they have taken – or the actions triggered by the their performed actions. See more information regarding this option here: KB0813747 - Send To Event Creator is not Sending the Notification to the User who has triggered the Event 16. Will an Email Notification with "Send When" set as "Event is fired" always trigger if the event is created, regardless of the table? Yes, an Email Notification configured with Send When as Event is fired will trigger if the associated event is created, regardless of what the table is configured as. When setting Send When to Event is fired on the UI form, you will notice that "Table" is no longer mandatory.