Importing a list from another provider
The format, what gets skipped, and why it is worth doing before the first send.
If you were sending somewhere else, you have a suppression list there. Bring it with you before the first real send.
Why beforehand
Because the bounces your previous provider already caught are bounces you are about to catch again. A new domain, sending for the first time, with 3% dead addresses, is exactly the profile a filter treats as a bought list.
Importing costs two minutes and saves the following week.
The file
A CSV, with the address in the first column:
email,reason
john@example.org,hard_bounce
mary@example.org,complaint
The second column is optional. When it is there, the reasons accepted are
hard_bounce, complaint, unsubscribe and manual; anything else comes in
as manual.
The header is recognised when the first cell is email, e-mail, address,
endereco or endereço. With no header at all it works too.
Limits: 50,000 lines and 10 MB. For more than that, split the file.
Importing
In the panel, under Suppressions, the Import a list button.
The result says how many addresses came in and how many lines were skipped:
4,812 addresses imported. 23 lines skipped because they were not valid addresses.
The skipped lines are counted rather than swallowed on purpose. A file exported from another system nearly always carries a few strange lines, and knowing it was 23 rather than 2,300 is the difference between carrying on and going back.
A line that is not an address does not stop the import. Half a list is better than none, and refusing the whole file over one line means the others never arrive.
Exporting from the previous provider
Almost all of them have a suppression export, under different names:
- SendGrid: Suppressions → Bounces, Blocks, Spam Reports, Unsubscribes. That is four files; you can join them.
- Mailgun: Suppressions → Bounces, Complaints, Unsubscribes.
- Amazon SES: the account level suppression list, over the API or in the console.
- Postmark: Suppressions, per stream.
If all you can export is the addresses with no reason, import them anyway: they
come in as manual, which is honest, because the real reason stayed in the
other system.
Afterwards
The list shows up under Suppressions, with a filter per reason and a count for each. It is worth a look: 96 hard bounces against 14 complaints says the problem is the list; the other way round says the problem is what is being sent.