Contacts that weren't added on import

After an upload you may see a Contacts not added panel. If everything went in, it says Nothing was held back from this upload instead.

The panel exists because a silent difference between "5,000 rows in my file" and "4,780 contacts in my list" is the kind of thing people discover weeks later.

Why rows get held back

• The address is unusable. Malformed, or a domain that does not exist.
• The address is suppressed. Someone who bounced, complained or unsubscribed. Importing them again does not undo that — deliberately. Adding them back would not make them mailable anyway, so the honest thing is to leave them out and say so.
• Duplicates within the file. The same address twice adds one contact.

Suppressed addresses are the interesting ones

Seeing a lot of them means the list overlaps heavily with people who have already opted out or already bounced. That is worth knowing before you build a campaign on it, and it is usually a sign the file came from an older export than you thought.

What to do

• A few held back: normal. Nothing to do.
• A large share held back: look at where the file came from before sending. See What "N mailable from M" means.
• Everything held back: almost always a column-mapping mistake — the email column was not mapped, so no row had a usable address. Re-check the mapping and upload again.

Fixing and re-uploading is safe

Re-importing does not create duplicates: an existing contact is updated rather than added twice. So correcting the file and uploading it again is the right move, not something to be careful about.

Next: open the Contacts not added panel and check whether the reason is invalid addresses or suppression — they need different responses.