An internal note is what you would have written on a sticky note pinned to the email: “long-standing customer, we already gave them a gesture”, “spoke to him on the phone, he calls back Monday”. Except it stays attached to the conversation and the whole team can see it.
What an internal note is
A note is stored in Trupeo, never sent. It has no recipient, it does not go out to your email provider, and the person who wrote to you cannot see it: it never leaves your shared inbox.
Every member of the mailbox can read it. That is the point: a note is meant to be found by whoever opens this email after you.
How to add one
At the bottom of a conversation there are two buttons: “Reply” and “Internal note”. The second opens the editor straight in note mode, with the reminder “Internal note: visible only to your team” next to a padlock.
You can also open “Reply” and switch to the “Internal note” tab: they are the two tabs of the same editor, and what you typed in each one is kept when you switch.
Then:
- Write. The formatting bar offers bold, italic, underline, bulleted list and numbered list.
- Type
@to mention a teammate. A list of members appears and narrows as you type; pick one with the arrow keys and Enter, or click it. The person mentioned gets a notification, “Alex mentioned you in a note”. - Finish with “Add the note”. Cmd + Enter (or Ctrl + Enter) does the same.
A note is capped at 5,000 characters. Once added it can be neither edited nor deleted, so write it as something meant to stay.
A note does not look like a reply
That is deliberate, and it shows in three places:
- In the editor. Note mode changes colour, turns a pale orange, and carries the line “Internal note: visible only to your team”. The button is not “Send” but “Add the note”.
- In the thread. The note sits in a pale orange card, marked by a small pencil in the margin, with “By” followed by the author’s name and the date. Incoming emails sit in white cards, and your replies in pale blue ones.
- In the list. A conversation holding at least one note carries a notepad icon; hover it to read “Internal notes”.
No note appears in the thread your correspondent receives: what they get are the emails you send, and nothing else.
Why this beats a WhatsApp message
In a small team, information travels wherever it is fastest: the WhatsApp group, a text, a word in passing. That works right up to the day the person who knew is on holiday.
An internal note fixes exactly that: the context stays stuck to the email. Three weeks later, whoever opens the conversation reads the customer’s question, the reply that went out, and the note explaining why. Nobody has to dig a thread out of another app, or remember who held the information.
It is also what makes a handover work: when you give an email to a colleague, a note hands them the context along with the message. See Assign a conversation.
Notes are one of three habits that decide whether a shared mailbox stays readable, along with assigning and tagging. The three together are covered in shared inbox best practices for small teams.