KB-1163 "Could not process received email... Message could not be sent... java.lang.NumberFormatException: For input string: "id1234"" error thrown when sending an email to an alias

Symptoms

Sending an email to an alias fails to trigger the configured process model. The following messages are seen in the application server log

[Appian EmailHandlerBean - 0] ERROR com.appiancorp.messaging.MessagePublisherServiceImpl - Could not process received email

INFO  [stdout] (Appian EmailHandlerBean - 0) java.lang.NumberFormatException: For input string: "id1234"

AND

[Appian EmailHandlerBean - 0] ERROR com.appiancorp.mdb.EmailHandlerBean - Error receiving message in EmailHandlerBean MDB

INFO  [stdout] (Appian EmailHandlerBean - 0) javax.mail.MessagingException: Message could not be sent;

INFO  [stdout] (Appian EmailHandlerBean - 0)   nested exception is:

10:41:35,044 INFO  [stdout] (Appian EmailHandlerBean - 0)   java.lang.NumberFormatException: For input string: "id1234"

Cause

This happens because of a misconfiguration in the custom.properties file, specifically in the conf.mailhandler.alias part. The routing prefixes were likely misconfigured, which means the system won’t be able to find the right process model to trigger.

Action

The misconfiguration likely happened in the routing prefix. The value processmodelid1234 was probably used as opposed to processmodel1234 (the latter being the correct value). Thus, the value id1234 becomes the ID that the system looks when it should be looking for 1234. Once this is corrected in the custom.properties file and the site is restarted, you will get around this error.

A separate recommendation would be to always use processmodeluuid because this parameter does not change when moving the model through different environments and always remains constant.

Refer to Sending an Email Message to a Process for more information.

Affected Versions

This article applies to all versions of Appian.