This tip comes from my colleague Bruce Sithole who did the hard yards to find out the answer to this question. As it turns out, the behavior is a little unpredictable. Firstly, multiple queues can process the email and create a Case. The order of processing appears to be first polled, first served. Also, there is a timing element in that after a period of time (presumably after some kind of flag set on the email, additional queues no longer process the email. So, for example, if an email is sent to the email of four queues, three Cases may be created.

So where does the email get attached to? Well, it gets passed between the Cases, as they are created. In this game of pass the parcel, the last Case created is the one that ends up with the prize when the music stops.

So how do we manage this in the real world when we only want one Case created for one email?

Alas, in this situation we will likely have to rely on code for a bulletproof solution. The best approach we came up with was to manipulate the email record, pre-create via a plugin, so that we could identify the preferred queue, mark as such on the email and then use this as a check on the Case creation. It is a tricky one though so if you know of another way to handle this (other than, you know, having one queue and then distributing once it is in Dynamics) feel free to comment.