Inbound routing rule failures

[LawesD]

We've just discovered that all of inbound rules for automated request creation are failing. 

They're specifically failing rather than not being triggered as the emails identified by the rule expression are ending up in the specified Target Folder Failure location. 

No changes have been made to the Inbound routing rules or the Routing rule templates

Earliest known failure - 2023-10-28 11:32:51

Any assistance appreciated. Please and thank you.

[James Ainsworth]

Hi LawesD,

Thanks for your post.  The Hornbill Cloud team have seen some errors coming from your system.  Can you check on the naming of the variables that are being used in your expressions.  It appears that the toAddress variable may not be written correctly.

[LawesD]

Thanks for the reply James.

So one of the most prominent that we use has the expression:
toAddress LIKE "%elearn@port.ac.uk%" or ccAddress LIKE "%elearn@port.ac.uk%"

This has not changed since September 2022 according to the last modified date. The template is older. 

[James Ainsworth]

Our logs show that there was a missing "d" in toAddress.

[LawesD]

Interesting! I'm not above a spelling error but I've just been through all the rules we have and there's no misspelling of toAddress. 

The example I gave above has not changed in over a year but the jobs aren't being logged today. 

In subsequent tests however the email is ending up in the success target folder, the job still has not been automatically logged but I'll check again in the morning. 

Thanks for the help so far

 

[James Ainsworth]

Good to hear about that last email ending up in the success target folder.  I'll look forward to hear if the job was successfully created or not. 

[LawesD]

Right so the emails are now reliably going to deleted items - a sign of success but no jobs logged.

I moved the routing rule in question to the very top of the order of rules. This logged a job! - Now, we do have other rules based on the same email address but they are to filter out emails we don't need jobs logged against. These were created before my time in the role and haven't been interfering before Saturday 28th as far as we know. 

Below are the rules that send their successes to the email deleted items folder (the same as our main job creation rule) and usually sit above in the priority order. So now I'm suspecting one of these is overstepping. Can you advise if:

toAddress = 'elearn@port.ac.uk' and fromAddress = 'postmaster@coventry.ac.uk'

or

toAddress LIKE "%elearn@port.ac.uk%" or ccAddress LIKE "%elearn@port.ac.uk%" and subject LIKE "%Out of hours%" or body LIKE "%annual leave%"

would supercede

toAddress LIKE "%elearn@port.ac.uk%" or ccAddress LIKE "%elearn@port.ac.uk%"

without their 'and' functions being satisfied?

Thanks for the support! attached are the full screens of the rule I'm trying to get working. 

 

 

[Steve Giller]

17 minutes ago, LawesD said:

I moved the routing rule in question to the very top of the order of rules. This logged a job!

This indicates that the Rule itself is fine.

The most likely issue now is that a higher priority Rule is "doing stuff" to the incoming email before the Elearn Emails rule is reached and moving it to the Deleted Items.
Rules are processed in order, so if any higher rule matches it will run against that email and no further rules will be processed.

The most likely culprit is:

toAddress LIKE "%elearn@port.ac.uk%" or ccAddress LIKE "%elearn@port.ac.uk%" and subject LIKE "%Out of hours%" or body LIKE "%annual leave%"

which will match if:

toAddress LIKE "%elearn@port.ac.uk%"
or 
ccAddress LIKE "%elearn@port.ac.uk%" and subject LIKE "%Out of hours%" 
or 
body LIKE "%annual leave%"

i.e. anything to elearn@port.ac.uk will match this expression.

Building expressions is documented here, note that "AND" always takes precedence over "OR"

Looking at the expression I believe you are trying to achieve the following:

(toAddress LIKE "%elearn@port.ac.uk%" or ccAddress LIKE "%elearn@port.ac.uk%") and (subject LIKE "%Out of hours%" or body LIKE "%annual leave%")

which would match an email sent or cc'd to elearn, and with an OOO or Annual Leave subject.

[LawesD]

This was all very helpful, thank you Steve