Tracking status decoder
Paste the status your carrier is showing and we will tell you which carrier says it, what stage of the journey it means, and when you can escalate. No tracking number needed — we do not ask for one.
- 493 statuses carry an explanation drafted by a machine ("OpenAI official-source research pass"). None of them can be published as verified or given an indexable page until a person checks it against the carrier — an LLM is never the authority on carrier policy.
- 9 statuses share one of 2 explanations — only 515 distinct explanations cover 541 statuses. The most reused appears on 5 of them. Pages built from these would be the near-identical programmatic content 04_SEO_CONTENT.md forbids.
- 55 statuses cite a URL that looks like one specific parcel rather than carrier documentation (for example https://tracking.apc-pli.com/1755000002789). Those are not sources, and they usually carry a real tracking number — publishing one would put a stranger's shipment identifier on our pages.
- 40 statuses point at an escalation rule we do not hold (15 distinct ids, for example dhl-express-stale-3-days, dhl-express-alert-immediate, globalpost-not-arrived-30-days). Those statuses show no escalation window at all rather than a wrong one, but the timing they were meant to carry is missing.
- 1 status has an alias carrying a qualifier that usually means a different status ("arriving late", "delayed", and similar). Decoding that phrase reports the canonical status's severity, which may understate it. Each probably needs its own entry.
We would rather show you where our data is weak than let it quietly give you a confident answer.
What this does, and what it will not do
Carrier tracking language is written for carrier operations, not for you. This turns the phrase into the stage of the journey it represents: moving, delayed, needs you to act, exception, being returned, delivered.
What it will not do is invent an explanation. If we have not verified what a carrier means by a phrase, we say so and send you to that carrier. An explanation we made up would look exactly as confident as one we checked, and you would have no way to tell the difference — which is the whole problem with most pages answering these questions.
What happens to what you paste
- We never ask for a tracking number. The decoder works on the status wording alone.
- If one comes along anyway, it is removed immediately. Anything shaped like a tracking number, email address, phone number, ZIP, or street address is stripped before the phrase is matched, shown back, or counted.
- Unrecognised phrases are counted, not collected. We keep a redacted, normalized form so we can see which gaps in the catalogue matter. That is how the next statuses get added.
- Nothing you type reaches an advertising or analytics system. That is enforced in code, not just promised.
How a status is matched
- The phrase is normalized — case, punctuation, accents, spacing.
- It is matched against every canonical phrase and alias we hold.
- Then against patterns, for statuses that carry a changing part like a facility name or a date.
- If a carrier event code is available, that is used first — it comes from the carrier's own system rather than from prose.
- If nothing matches, you get an honest "we have not seen this", a carrier guess with a confidence figure, and somewhere to go next.
Escalation windows
When you can open a search, raise a claim, or start a support ticket is carrier policy, so we treat it like every other carrier rule: versioned, sourced, dated, and marked unverified until a person checks it. Our current snapshot is 2026-08-30, and none of it has been re-verified yet.
Add a date above and we will tell you where you stand against each window — including which event the clock runs from, which is the detail these deadlines are most often misquoted on.