E-mail formats for e-mail listeners
The E-mail Listeners application can process free form e-mail messages or formatted e-mails. You can configure a system property to determine how some alternative e-mail formats are processed.
Typically, an e-mail contains only plain text, only HTML text, or both HTML and plain text. An e-mail that contains both HTML and plain text is a multipart alternative e-mail. You can configure the mxe.listener.multipart.alternative.html property to determine how multipart alternative e-mails are processed. When the property is set to 1, the HTML version of the e-mail message body is used. When the property is set to 0, the plain text version of the e-mail message body is used.
Free form e-mails
Free form e-mails do not follow any specific structure. The E-mail Listeners application first extracts the subject line and body of free form e-mails. Then, it uses the subject line or body to either create a service request or to update an existing ticket.
Free form e-mails are always processed as service requests. If you plan to support other types of tickets, use formatted messages only.
Formatted e-mails
Formatted e-mails use specific structure in the message body to instruct the E-mail Listeners application to manipulate various types of tickets and business objects. Formatted e-mails can be composed using XML tags or text typed in the form of attribute-value pairs. They can perform specific actions, such as changing the status of a business object or querying the business object based on criteria. QUERY, CREATE or UPDATE, and CHANGE STATUS e-mails are all types of formatted e-mails.
However, if the mxe.listener.multipart.alternative.html property is set to 1, only the non-XML Key=Value format type can be used in the message body. If the mxe.listener.multipart.alternative.html property is set to 0, both XML and non-XML format types can be used.
To support other business objects, you can create your own workflow process and associated processing logic. A built-in workflow process that supports various types of ticket objects is shipped.