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Dashes imported as "malformed" in CSV

edited July 2020 in Troubleshooting

I tried importing a list of contacts today, but the email addresses that contained dashes (-) became malformed. For example, Joe-Smith@abc.com was skipped, and when I downloaded the list of reasons it is shown with the format of Joe‐Smith@abc.com. I checked the format of the imported CSV and the addresses look to be correctly formatted with dashes. Any ideas?

Comments

  • Hi,

    I tested by importing a CSV with Joe-Smith@abc.com inside and it was imported without any problems though:

    Best regards,
    Ben

  • edited July 2020

    Ok so I created a CSV with the same name and email and it worked fine.

    However, I then anonymized one of the emails that got rejected and put it in a CSV like this:

    Name Email
    M Hook accounting@hook-egr.com

    It gets rejected and here is the output CSV:

    Email address Reason
    accounting@hook-egr.com Malformed

    So that time it did not change the - (maybe excel does that) but it still rejects the - in this case for some reason.

    Give it a try and let me know what happens for you.

    I uploaded a list of 20k emails today and about a thousand got rejected for this reason.

  • BenBen
    edited July 2020

    Hi,

    I tried importing accounting@hook-egr.com and it could not be imported. I checked the dash and see that it's a non standard dash.

    Please see the screenshot below, you can see that a standard dash (line 2) is longer than the dash you're using (line 1):

    I suggest doing a "search and replace" in your CSV to replace all the short/non-standard dashes with the standard dash.

    Thanks.

    Best regards,
    Ben

  • edited July 2020

    Ok, well that explains why I was able to import the addresses after replacing the †with a dash. I had no idea that the originals had "non-standard" dashes! Thank you

    Also, one request from me would be that for the CSV reports of failed address imports, it would be nice if the report listed both the Name and Email. Then I'd be able to fix the email addresses and re-import the CSV after deleting the column of failure reasons.

    Overall I'm very happy with Sendy so far. I tried using a startup company for a little while (muxemail), but this software is so much better! I've also got some experience with Ubuntu Server and so installing it myself was not as intimidating as it might be for most people.

    Thanks again!

  • Thanks for your feedback! I'm happy to hear that. :)

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