Contacts, lists & imports

A contact is one person you email. A contact is identified by their email address, and each address exists once in your workspace. Two spellings of the same address are one person, because addresses are matched without regard to capital letters.

A list is a named group of contacts. Membership is explicit: someone is on a list because an import put them there or because you added them. A list is never a saved search, so it never changes on its own.

An import is one file you uploaded or one block of rows you pasted, plus the record of what that file did: who was added, who was updated, and who was skipped and why. Campaigns are aimed at lists, not at imports.

Pages in this section

• Find, add, and act on contacts covers searching, the four filters, adding one person by hand, and the five bulk actions you can run on a selection.
• Contact details, custom fields, and removal covers editing the fields your merge tokens read, reading what you have sent someone, and the difference between deleting and erasing a person.
• Work with lists covers creating, renaming, describing, archiving, and deleting a list, and what the Health column is telling you.
• Import contacts from a file walks the whole import wizard, from choosing a file to reading the summary and undoing the whole thing.
• CSV format and what gets skipped is the reference page: accepted separators, size limits, how addresses are normalized, and every reason a row is skipped.

The stance to expect

Nothing is written to your contacts until you press Apply import. Everything before that (reading the file, checking the columns, choosing a list) is a proposal you can correct or abandon.

Re-importing a file is safe. An address ColdMerge already knows updates the person you already have rather than creating a second copy, and an empty cell never wipes a value you already had.