The E-mail Listeners application can process free form e-mail messages or formatted e-mails.
Free form e-mails are in plain text and 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 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.
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.