Selecting the matching outbound mailbox

This functionality is important only if you have multiple inbound mail boxes associated with the same process, and have configured your system so that users receive replies from the address that they used to contact the service desk.

You can associate multiple inbound e-mail addresses with one process, so you need to configure which of the inbound e-mail addresses for the process was used to log the specific process. If you do not, then outbound e-mails from a process could be sent from a different address from that used to log the process.

The Process Management\Process object includes two attributes to help overcome this:

  • Reply E-mail Address
  • Reply Display Name

All top-level process objects (for example, Change and Incident) are based on this object and therefore also have these attributes.

These attributes are populated with the values taken from the E-mail Address and Display Name fields for the Inbound Mailbox that was used to log the process. If your system is configured to send outbound e-mails automatically for this process, the mail box used to send the e-mails is determined from these values.

This provides a mechanism to send outbound e-mails correctly for processes that were logged by e-mail. However, you need to configure your system to handle outbound e-mails for processes that were not logged by e-mail, because in this instance the Reply E-mail Address and Reply Display Name attributes on the process will be empty.

The outbound mail box to use is determined in the following order:

  1. Using the Reply E-mail Address and Reply Display Name attributes on the process instance.
  2. Using the mailbox for the process if the process is associated with only one Mailbox.
  3. Using the Mailbox defined in the Outbound Mail Server Settings.

For actions on a task that use outbound mail, the parent process is used to determine what action to take.

We recommend that you DO NOT add the Reply E-mail Address and Reply Display Name attributes to the process window – users should not set these values themselves.

There are several methods for populating these fields when the process is not logged by e-mail. The method you choose will depend on your specific requirements. You could populate these fields using:

  • a template
  • copy rules
  • automatic process actions

For information about these options, see the Designer Guide.