Carbon Platform v2026.8
Messages in both portals now come with email subscriptions. Add a shared mailbox on the Messages page and every Surfboard notice — settlements, integrations, maintenance — arrives as an email. Nothing is subscribed by default.
August 31, 2026
📬 Email Subscriptions for Messages
Category: Partner Portal, Merchant Portal
Messages is the inbox where Surfboard publishes notices to your account: settlement changes, integration and API updates, planned maintenance, renewals, service changes. Until now a notice only lived in the portal, so it waited for the next login. Both portals now carry an Email notifications card at the bottom of the Messages page, and every address on it receives each notice as a branded email the moment it is published.
- Add an address and click Add. It does not need to be a portal login — a shared mailbox such as
finance@orintegrations@is the point - We send a confirmation link. The address shows as Pending and receives nothing until it is clicked, then flips to Active and picks up from the next notice
- Resend for a confirmation that never arrived, Remove address to stop
- Subscriptions belong to the partner or merchant account, not to the user who added them. Anyone with portal access can add or remove addresses, and several can be active at once
- Nothing is subscribed by default. A new account starts with an empty list. If you skip this step, the notices stay in the portal
The inbox itself is unchanged: notices listed newest first with a severity of Info, Warning or Critical, an unread badge on the sidebar item, and a banner across the top of the portal for critical notices until they are read.
🔔 Messages vs. Notifications
Category: Partner Portal, Merchant Portal
The two are easy to confuse, so the guides now draw the line. Messages are notices from Surfboard to you. Notifications under Settings are alerts about your own activity — merchant onboarding, terminal registration, file transfers, application status — delivered by email, Slack or SFTP. Set up both.
📗 New Guides
Category: Documentation
- Partner Portal → Messages — the inbox under Support → Messages, the subscription flow, and which shared mailboxes to use for settlement, integration and merchant-facing notices
- Merchant Portal → Messages — the same walk-through for merchants, placed in Getting Started so it is read before the first notice lands
- The Settings and Dashboard guides in both portals now link across to Messages and explain that the Notifications they describe are about your own activity, not notices from us