The CA Service Desk Manager (SDM) Email interface does not seem to be reading the body of the email

Products

• CA IT Asset Manager
• CA Software Asset Manager (CA SAM)
• ASSET PORTFOLIO MGMT- SERVER
• SUPPORT AUTOMATION- SERVER
• CA Service Desk Manager - Unified Self Service
• CA Service Desk Manager
• CA Service Management - Asset Portfolio Management
• CA Service Management - Service Desk Manager

Issue/Introduction

Description:

The CA SDM email interface may not read the body of an email. Verbose logging ("pdm_logstat -n pdm_maileater_nxd verbose") on the process shows the following in the Service Desk installation directory\log\stdlog.# log files:

02/01 09:09:35.21 SDSERVER pdm_maileater_nxd 1332 TRACE hunny_parse822.c 356 Processing Email From([email protected]) Subject(Incident) Body()

Solution:

The CA SDM email interface can only process plain text emails. By default some email clients like Microsoft Outlook will in many cases send 2 content types in the same email (plain/text and html usually).

There will be a section marked:

Content-Type: multipart/alternative;

and then one part as:

Content-Type: text/plain;

And then the next part as:

Content-Type: text/html;

This means that the email has the body twice, in two parts, one plain text - which is processed and used by Service Desk.

Some email clients or even applications (like Microsoft SharePoint) may only send the email in "text/html" or other format which Service Desk will not parse.

To troubleshoot this issue, you may take the following steps:

1. Enable logging for the email process:
   
   pdm_logstat -n pdm_maileater_nxd verbose
   
   
2. Configure your mailbox rule to "Save Unknown Emails"
   
   
3. Draft an email to Service Desk with a subject line that does NOT match any of your mailbox rules.
   
   
4. Check the following folder for a *.eml file: Service Desk\site\mail_unknown\
   
   
5. Open that file in a text editor and look for a section that Service Desk can read, (must be plain/text), for example:
   
   Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-15"
   Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
   %CUSTOMER=Smith.John
   %[email protected]
   %URGENCY=3
   %DESCRIPTION=testing
   %CATEGORY=Applications
   
   If you do not find a section with "Content-Type: text/plain", then your email is not in plain text and will not be parsed by Service Desk correctly.
   
   
6. To disable the logging, run this command:
   
   pdm_logstat -n pdm_maileater_nxd
   
   
7. You may also check the "stdlog.#" files under: <Service Desk Install directory>\log\ for more information.

Environment

Release: UAPMAC990JPP-12.6-Asset Portfolio Management-Asset Configuration
Component: