Inbound Email for ServiceNow

This guide is about mail arriving at the instance: a message lands, the platform classifies it, and an inbound email flow or action turns it into a record. Mail leaving the instance — notifications, templates, mail scripts, weights — is a different subject; see email-notifications.

Three things account for most of the time lost here:

1. Inbound email flows run before inbound email actions and can end processing entirely. Debugging the action list on an instance that uses flows is looking at the wrong layer.
2. Inbound actions run in order, and stop_processing on a matching action suppresses the actions that come after it. People consistently read that arrow backwards.
3. Several snow_inbound_email_action arguments do not write the column their name suggests. The column does not exist, so the value never persists, and the tool's create response reports only sys_id, name and type — nothing in it tells you a field went missing.