Email loop false positive

Question

At the end of each month, one of our clients sends us a bunch of emails related to invoicing (~120 emails). Each email has the same subject and body, but a different attachment.

The emails are sent to an email address which gets forwarded to a salesforce email services address as part of Email-to-Case.

After about 20 emails, cases stop being created and salesforce errors with

The following errors were encountered while processing an incoming email:

LIMIT_EXCEEDED : A loop was detected in Email-to-Case processing

<insert email here>

Other than asking our client to change this email, or changing process on our end, what options do I have to stop SF flagging these emails as in a loop?

Answer 1

According to Bounce back loop from 'Email-to-Case' creates more than 1000 Cases:

Salesforce has set measures to detect an email loop from an external email system. This is set in place to prevent a continual loop that could cause a large amount of erroneous inbound messages into a Salesforce.com organization.

The 'Email to Case' looping algorithm looks at Subject, Sender, and Body to detect looping. After receiving more than 15 emails in 60 seconds with the same content in the three fields, the loop detection will trigger and stop creating Cases within that time span.

Is it possible for them to throttle the rate at which the emails are sent?

Otherwise I think your options are limited. They would need to make the subject, sender, or body fields unique to avoid the loop detection.

Or you could create your own Apex Messaging.InboundEmailHandler.

See also:

• Email-to-Case 'Error(s) encountered while processing' with NULL body content