How to get email notifications when a vessel arrives at port

If you need to know the moment a vessel arrives at a specific port, manually checking tracking sites is not a sustainable solution. The vessel might arrive at 2am, over a weekend, or while you're in a meeting. What you need is an automatic email notification — sent the moment the arrival is detected.

Here's how to set that up in under two minutes.

What you'll need

To set up vessel arrival email notifications you need two things:

• The vessel's IMO or MMSI number — both are publicly available on MarineTraffic. The IMO is a permanent 7-digit number, the MMSI is a 9-digit radio identifier. Either works.
• The UN/LOCODE for the target port — a 5-character code that uniquely identifies the port. For example, Felixstowe is GBFXT, Southampton is GBSOU, Rotterdam is NLRTM. You can find any port's LOCODE at unece.org or on MarineTraffic.

Setting up the alert

With Portool, the process takes under two minutes:

• Create a free account at portool.io — no credit card required
• Click Add Vessel and enter the vessel name, IMO or MMSI number
• Enter the target port LOCODE
• Select Arrival alert and click Add Vessel

From that point, Portool monitors the vessel's AIS position every 20 minutes. When it detects the vessel arriving at your target port, it sends an email to your registered address immediately.

What the alert looks like

The arrival alert email arrives from alerts@portool.io and includes the vessel name, the port it has arrived at, and a link to your Portool dashboard. It's designed to give you the information you need at a glance — no logging in required to understand what's happened.

Beyond arrival alerts

Portool also supports departure alerts — useful if you need to know when a vessel leaves a port — and delay alerts, which fire if a vessel's ETA passes by more than four hours without an arrival being detected. You can configure these per vessel when you add it.

How accurate is it?

Portool uses AIS data updated every 20 minutes, combined with port event detection that records arrivals at 1-minute intervals. In practice this means you'll typically receive an arrival alert within 20 minutes of a vessel actually docking — fast enough for any logistics planning purpose.