ServiceNow is set by default to look at someone’s primary email address when the email the system to match it against their user record – for example emails from n.hynes@soton.ac.uk automatically get matched against my Nick Hynes ServiceNow record.
Unfortunately, some people have their email clients set up to use an alternate address to the standard primary one.  This is usually [username]@soton.ac.uk.  If people emailed ServiceNow from these email clients, the system could not find them so their emails came in as “Guest”.  This was undesirable as the ServiceDesk had to either manually find the user record or the tickets never got matched and stayed as “Guest”, meaning it was hard to identify the callers and they could not log in and see their tickets on the portal.  It also meant that email approvals did not work on these addresses as the system could not identify the approvers.
We have now implemented an improvement that means anyone emailing from a [username]@soton.ac.uk address will also get matched against their user record, reducing these “Guest” tickets and ServiceDesk overhead considerably, as well as allowing the email approval system to work.  We hope to extend this functionality to other email aliases, including @ecs.soton.ac.uk email addresses in the near future.