Tracking & visibility

Talk about a shipment with notes and @mentions

Notes are the conversation attached to a single shipment. Anyone who can open that shipment can read them — including people at the other companies on the move — and every note emails the whole audience with the full thread and a working reply address.

6 minute read · Updated July 27, 2026

Every note emails everyone with access, mentioned or not.

Typing an @mention does not decide who is notified. Conterminal emails every active user at every organization that can see the shipment, except you. The mention only changes the subject line and the framing of the email. Write notes on the assumption that your customer, your broker, your forwarder, and the warehouse will all read them.

Posting a note on a shipment

Open the shipment. Go to the container detail page from Operations or from a link in an email.
Open the notes dialog. If the shipment already has notes, a strip near the top of the page shows the most recent one and a count such as 3 notes — click it. If there are no notes yet that strip is not rendered at all, so use the Actions menu in the page header and choose Add Note.
Read the room first. The dialog is titled Notes and carries the subtitle “Shared with everyone who can access this tracking item.” Oldest note is at the top, newest at the bottom, and the view scrolls to the bottom on open. Your own notes are right-aligned in blue; everyone else's are left-aligned with their name in orange. Hover a name to see the company it belongs to. Only the most recent 100 notes are loaded.
Write it. The field is labeled Write a note with the placeholder Write a note…. It is a plain-text box — there is no bold, italic, heading, or list formatting, by design. Line breaks are kept.
Send it. Select Add Note. The button is disabled until the box has non-whitespace content. The note posts, the box clears, and the thread reloads.

A note is capped at 5,000 characters, and the editor enforces that silently. Once you cross the limit your keystrokes are undone with no error message and no counter — the text simply stops accepting input. If typing appears to have stopped working, you are at the cap. Split the note in two.

Notes cannot be edited or deleted from the app. There is no edit control, no delete control, and no draft. Treat Add Note as final, because the emails go out immediately.

In a warehouse workspace the shipment page does not render the notes strip. If you work a warehouse workspace and expect to see a discussion that a colleague can see, that is why.

@mentioning someone, including at another company

Mentions in Conterminal are called callouts, and they cover more than people. You can tag a person, but also a driver, a terminal, a vessel, a bill of lading, or a reference number — every value is drawn from this specific shipment, so you cannot mistype one.

Type @ at the start of a line or after a space. The picker opens as you type. It will not open mid-word, so email@example.com does not trigger it.
Or select the Add callout button below the note box. It opens the same picker with a search field reading Find a person, driver, customer, terminal…
Pick an entry. Results are grouped by kind — User, Driver, Customer, Carrier, Broker, Forwarder, Terminal, Warehouse, Vessel, Steamship Line, Container, Master B/L, House B/L, and Reference.
The callout is inserted as a chip with spaces added around it, and the cursor returns to the note box.

The two kinds render differently, and the difference is the whole point:

User callouts: Rendered as bold @Name. These are the only callouts that resolve to a real person. Mentioning a user changes their email subject to “… mentioned you on CMAU1234567” and its heading to “You were mentioned on CMAU1234567”.
Everything else: Rendered as a blue chip reading @Terminal: APM Elizabeth, @Container: CMAU1234567, and so on. These are labels for humans to read. They notify nobody — a terminal does not have a Conterminal login, and tagging a Driver does not text or email that driver.

Mentioning is not routing.

Because every accessible user is emailed on every note regardless, the practical use of an @mention is to say who you are talking to, not to reach someone who would otherwise miss it. Conversely, leaving someone out of your mentions does not keep the note away from them.

Anyone you mention who is at another company gets the same email you would get, containing the full thread. Conterminal does not redact earlier notes from partner organizations.

Who you can mention, and why it changes per shipment

The picker is built fresh for each shipment. There is no global company directory behind it. For a delivery order, Conterminal collects the organizations attached to the move — the owner, customer, BCO, broker, forwarder, carrier, warehouse, and the organization that originated it — plus any recorded relationships and any access grants that have not been revoked. Each of those partner organizations is then re-checked against the shipment's own access rules before its people are offered to you.

Within those organizations, only users with an active, organization-scoped role assignment appear. A revoked assignment removes the person from the list immediately. For a managed tracking item that is not linked to a delivery order, the list is narrower: only your own organization.

Two people with the same display name are disambiguated with their email in parentheses, so you will occasionally see Chris Diaz (chris@acmefreight.com) instead of just Chris Diaz. Pick the one whose address you recognize.

The non-person callouts are pulled straight from the shipment record: pickup and return drivers, pickup and return terminals, the vessel, the steamship line, the warehouse or delivery location, the container number, the master and house bills of lading, and the broker, PO, and tracking references. If a field is empty on the shipment, that callout does not exist. That is why the picker is shorter on a sparse record.

When nothing at all is available, the Add callout button is disabled and typing @ does nothing. If the picker is open but your search matches nothing, it reads No relevant callouts found.

Replying by email

Note emails come from alerts@conterminal.com under the sender name Conterminal> Notes. Each one carries a summary block with Container, Bill of Lading, and Contents where those are known, the whole discussion rendered as chat bubbles, and an Open discussion button that lands you on the shipment with the notes dialog already open.

If the email begins with --- Reply above this line to add a note --- and “Reply to this email to add a note to the same tracking item.”, you can just hit reply. Conterminal takes the text you wrote above that marker and posts it as a new note on the same shipment, attributed to you. If those two lines are missing, the reply path is not configured for your deployment and a reply will go nowhere.

The reply address is unique to you and to that one note — it looks like notes+n1…@m.conterminal.com. Several checks run before the reply is accepted:

It must be from you: The From address must match the Conterminal user the reply address was issued to, that user's email must be confirmed, the account must not be suspended, and the organization role must still be active. Forwarding the email to a colleague so they can reply does not work — the address is bound to you.
It must authenticate: The sending domain has to pass an aligned SPF or DKIM check. A reply relayed through a service that breaks alignment is rejected.
You must still have access: Access to the shipment is re-checked at the moment the reply arrives, not when the email was sent. If the grant was revoked in between, the reply is rejected.
It must not be automated: Out-of-office autoresponders, bounce messages from mailer-daemon or postmaster, and anything carrying Auto-Submitted, Precedence: bulk, or a List-Id header are discarded without processing.

Only the text above the marker is kept. Conterminal also stops at On … wrote:, at -----Original Message-----, at Begin forwarded message:, and at the first quoted > line, so quoted history does not end up in the note. Signatures typed above the marker do end up in the note. The same 5,000-character cap applies, and an empty reply is rejected.

A rejected reply is silent.

When a reply fails any of these checks it is logged and dropped. Conterminal does not bounce it, does not email you an explanation, and nothing appears on the shipment. If you replied and no note showed up, assume it was rejected rather than delayed, and post the note in the app instead.

Replying twice to the same email — or a mail server delivering the same message twice — does not create duplicate notes. Conterminal recognizes the repeat and returns the note it already created.

Notes on delivery orders vs managed tracking items

Conterminal has two kinds of shipment record, and notes behave differently on each.

Delivery orders: The multi-party record. Notes are visible to every organization on the move that passes the shipment's access check, and posting requires comment permission on that delivery order in your active workspace.
Managed tracking items: Your own tracking record. Notes are visible only inside your organization. The dialog is available only in a BCO or freight-forwarder workspace, and only to platform admins, tenant admins, tenant managers, and tenant users.

A confirmed link merges the two threads.

When a managed tracking item is confirmed as linked to a delivery order, Conterminal resolves both surfaces to the delivery order. The notes you see on the managed item and on the delivery order are then one and the same thread, and a note posted from either place is visible from both — including to the partner organizations on the delivery order. That is the intended behavior, not a leak, but it is a real change in audience the moment a link is confirmed.

Before the link is confirmed, the two records keep separate threads. That is the usual explanation for the same container appearing to have two different conversations.

You cannot post a note from a personal workspace. Switch to a company workspace first, or the dialog answers Select an active workspace first. or You don't have access to this tracking item.

What Conterminal keeps

Stored: The note text exactly as written, including the callout tokens, plus who wrote it, which organization they wrote it under, and when. For an emailed reply, Conterminal also keeps the raw message, its checksum, the message ID, the envelope and header addresses, the subject, and the mail-authentication headers as evidence that the reply was genuinely yours.
Not kept: There is no edit history and no soft-delete, because notes cannot be edited or deleted. Quoted email history below the reply marker is stripped before the note is created and never becomes part of the thread.

Notification emails are addressed to one recipient at a time — there is no CC list, so recipients do not see each other's addresses. Each email carries the entire thread, however, so anything already written on the shipment travels with it.

Notes are the wrong place for rates, credentials, or anything you would not want a counterparty to read. The audience is defined by the shipment, not by you, and it grows automatically when a new organization is added to the move.

Troubleshooting

The person you expect is not in the mention list

Their organization is not attached to this shipment, their access grant was revoked, or their organization-scoped role assignment was revoked — any one of those removes them. Confirm the company actually appears on this delivery order rather than on a sibling record, then have an administrator check that the person still holds an active role. On a managed tracking item with no confirmed delivery-order link, only your own organization's users are ever listed, so a partner contact will never appear there.

The Add callout button is greyed out

No callouts could be built for this shipment. That means both that no accessible users were resolved and that the record has no container number, bill of lading, terminal, driver, vessel, or reference to offer. Typing @ does nothing in that state either. Add the missing fields to the shipment and reopen the dialog.

Two note threads on one container

You are looking at two records. A managed tracking item and a delivery order for the same container keep separate threads until the link between them is confirmed; once it is, both surfaces show the single delivery-order thread. Check whether the managed item's link is confirmed. The same symptom also appears when two delivery orders exist for one container — in that case the threads are genuinely separate and always will be.

Your emailed reply did not post

Replies are dropped silently, so there is nothing to look for in your inbox. The common causes are replying from a different address than the one the email was sent to, forwarding the email to a colleague who then replies, a mail gateway that breaks SPF and DKIM alignment, an empty body, or writing your text below the “Reply above this line” marker instead of above it. Post the note in the app and, if it keeps happening, send support the message ID of the reply you sent.

The note strip is missing on a shipment that has notes

In a warehouse workspace the strip is not rendered. Otherwise, the strip is also absent when the shipment genuinely has no notes yet — it only appears once at least one note exists. Use Actions → Add Note to start the thread.

“Could not load notes.”

The thread failed to load. A Retry button appears next to the message on the shipment page. If it keeps failing, the usual cause is that your workspace lost read access to the shipment rather than a transient error.

“Could not add note.” or “Could not add this note.”

The note was not saved and nothing was emailed. Conterminal prepares the notification list before it writes the note, so a failure while resolving the audience blocks the whole thing. Reload the shipment and try once more; if it repeats, contact support with the container number.

“Notes must be 5,000 characters or fewer.”

The server rejected an over-length note. In the app the editor normally prevents this by silently refusing the extra keystrokes, so you are most likely seeing it on an emailed reply. Shorten it and send again.

“You don’t have access to this tracking item.”

Your active workspace cannot comment on this shipment. Check the workspace switcher — a personal workspace can never post notes, and a managed tracking item needs a BCO or freight-forwarder workspace with a tenant role. If you believe the workspace is right, ask an administrator to confirm your organization is still a party to this shipment.

You never got an email for a note you can see

You do not receive notifications for your own notes. Otherwise, check that your Conterminal user's email address is correct and that your role assignment in that organization is active — the notification list is built from active organization role assignments, so a revoked one removes you from the shipment's audience entirely. Conterminal does not surface a delivery failure to the person who wrote the note, so nobody on the shipment will know your copy went missing.