Understanding import error reports

Sometimes during the import, some contacts are not imported to the list due to errors. You can get a detailed error report to fix them and try to import your contacts again.

How to download the error report

Right after the import

Right after importing contacts, click on the link Error report to download the report.

download the error report after importing contacts.

In the Import history section

You can also download reports by going ContactsToolsImport history. To download the import error report, click the down arrow icon next to Errors in the Statistics column.

what to click to download

Import error reports are available for 7 days.

What error reports look like

The report is downloaded in CSV format.

Import error report file in csv format

Examples of errors in email addresses:

  • Invalid format for the email address. Email address contains spaces, Cyrillic characters, or other unsupported characters.
  • Invalid format for the phone number. The phone number contains spaces, Cyrillic characters, or other unsupported characters.
  • Role-based or technical email address. Potentially dangerous email address that didn’t get imported due to its negative impact on deliverability and both sender and domain reputation. If you want to send campaigns to role-based or technical addresses, use Double Opt-In.
  • Duplicate email address. When importing, duplicates are removed automatically and only one email address gets imported.

 

If you import more than 10,000 contacts at once, you may encounter a rare scenario where certain duplicates — containing additional data beyond the email address — do not appear in the import error report. Instead, these duplicates will be automatically updated to match the information from the first occurrence.

For example, a contact [email protected] — Name: NAAAme in the row 11,389 will be updated to match [email protected] — name: Name from the row 2.

In the screenshot below, Selzy automatically updated 540 duplicates found among 12,714 imported contacts and placed them under Update and, as a result, did not include them into the import error report. It happened because during import, Selzy split the file and some contacts got to be uploaded simultaneously to ensure high upload speed. However, no contacts were lost.

540 duplicate contacts ended up in the update section of the import completed screen and not in the errors section

You can also receive the following warning during the import:

  • There may be a typo in the domain name in the address. For example, gail.com instead of gmail.com. We advise you to double-check such addresses.

 

Contacts with errors are excluded, while contacts with warnings are included.

How to fix errors and import contacts again

  1. In the error report file, check out the row number in the first column. Please note that the system excludes the header row when it contains labels or names and begins counting rows from the subsequent one.
  2. Find an error specified in the Message column.
  3. In the file that we used to import the contacts from, find the row by its number and fix the error.
  4. Repeat steps 1-3 with the other rows.
  5. Save the file with the contacts and import them to Selzy again.

Example

The file used to import contacts contained errors in email addresses.

file with errors

After importing contacts, download the error report.

Downloaded import error report

In the first column, it states that there are errors in rows 5 and 7.

In the Message column, the error message states Invalid format for the email address. The email address [email protected] om has an extra space in the domain part of the address. And the email address [email protected] contains superfluous full stops.

Go back to the file used to import contacts. Remember, that the system excluded the header row containing the column name "Email", so the email addresses to fix will be in the rows 6 and 8, not 5 and 7.  Delete the space and full stops.

editing out the errors

This is what the edited file will look like:

Edited import file with extra spaces removed

Save the changes and import the file again. The file is imported without errors.

Useful links:

Import contacts
Preparing contacts for import
How to import phone numbers
How to remove the inactive contacts from your database

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