Messages

Overview

Messages is where Surfboard talks to you. When we publish something that concerns your business, it lands here, addressed to your merchant account. That could be a settlement change, a renewal reminder, planned maintenance, a service change or a new feature.

You’ll find it in the sidebar between Support and Settings. A counter on the menu item shows how many messages you haven’t read yet.

Important: Subscribe an email address on the Messages page as soon as you have access to the portal. The inbox only helps if someone opens it. With a subscription, every notice also arrives as an email, so the right people hear about a settlement or service change when we publish it, not the next time somebody happens to log in.

The inbox

The page is laid out like an email inbox: the list of messages on the left and the selected message on the right. Until you pick one, the right side says Select a message to read it.

Each row in the list shows:

• A label for the kind of message: Product update, Critical, Warning or Notice
• The date it was published
• The title and a short preview, and a thumbnail if the message has an image
• A dot if you haven’t read it yet

If you’ve received both notices and product updates, a filter above the list lets you show All, only Notices or only Product updates.

Click a message to read it. It opens in the reading pane with its full text, any images or video, and sometimes a link button to the relevant page or guide. Opening a message marks it as read, and the unread counter in the sidebar goes down. The address in your browser changes to point at that message, so you can share the link with a colleague who also uses the portal.

If there are no messages yet, the page says No messages yet.

Banners across the top of the portal

Some messages are also shown as a banner across the top of every page until you’ve read them, so you won’t miss them even if you never open Messages.

• Notices show their text in the banner, sometimes with a link.
• Product updates show a New label and a See what’s new » button that opens the full update on the Messages page.

Some banners can be closed with the ✕ on the right.

Subscribe to email notifications

Below the inbox is the Email notifications card: Get these notices by email too. Any address you add here receives every notice we publish to your account by email, as well as seeing it in the portal.

To subscribe an address:

1. Open Messages from the sidebar and find Email notifications.
2. Enter the address (the placeholder suggests notifications@yourcompany.com) and click Add.
3. We send a confirmation link to that address. Until it’s clicked, the address shows as Pending and receives nothing.
4. Once confirmed, the status changes to Active, and emails start with the next notice.

If the confirmation email didn’t arrive, click Resend next to the pending address. To stop emails to an address, click the ✕ next to it. The address is removed straight away, with no confirmation step.

Which address to use

Subscriptions belong to your merchant account, not to an individual user, and the address doesn’t need to be a portal login. That makes a shared mailbox the best choice:

• finance@ for anything about settlements and payouts
• ops@ or store@ so the people on the floor hear about terminal and service changes
• Your own address as well, if you’re the one who acts on these notices

You can add several. Anyone on your team with portal access can add or remove addresses.

Tip: Nothing is subscribed by default. A new merchant account starts with an empty list, so if you skip this step the notices only live in the portal.

Messages vs. notifications

Messages are notices from Surfboard to you. Settings → Notifications is different: it sends your own reports and payment events by email, Slack or SFTP. See Settings. Set up both.