Getting Email List Quality Error on Import, List is 100% Opt-In Valid Emails

I'm really lost for what to do here, and this is happening with several examples of email lists in csv format.

Quote

This list has addresses that may cause high bounce rates and spam reports. Remove any fake, invalid, and improperly formatted addresses, and ensure you have consent to mail everyone on your list.

I am trying to import a CSV of email signups that were people who came directly to a landing page and entered their information in order to receive ticket presale notifications. All of the emails are valid (I even recognize a handful of them) and are 100% voluntary signups of people who engage with our business.

Additionally, there are a few I am importing from venues we work with. They are lists on which people opted into marketing communications. As for the quality of these email addresses, they MUST be real and valid and properly formatted - these are emails the customer used to receive order confirmations and tickets in order to attend an event.

So in all of these cases, I get that error message, which is making me entirely regret migrating from MailChimp to SquareSpace for this part of our business. I get that spam and quality of email lists are a thing, I just can't think of a better example than voluntary signups by people who are clearly real individuals?

I need a rather urgent resolution on this or else I will have to go back to MailChimp, so any help is appreciated!

Hi @dylanmaustin, that sounds frustrating! Does Campaigns allow you to move forward with the email import? If so, Squarespace will automatically clean your list after your first email blast, removing any emails that bounce. If Campaigns is not allowing you to import the emails, you should reach out directly to support and they can help you further.  

I think I will go that route, as it is not letting me move forward with the process, thank you. Any way to prevent this in the future?

I'm afraid I don't have any ideas, as I haven't come across this particular error before. I'd love to know what Support says, though. Could you post their response here in case someone else runs into this issue?

Sure thing. I did submit this question on the 30th and have heard no response. Any way to encourage that on Squarespace's end?

Did you ever get a response? Having the same issue and it's frustrating!

I would not hold your breath.  We've had the same issue and the chat repeatedly just tells us its out of scope for them to support it.  In the end, I have to pay for a separate service.

I just had the same problem importing a mailing list with 206 addresses (100% correct and consenting addresses), and the silent fail was quite frustrating. How about showing to the user WHICH email adresses are supposedly fake or wrongly formatted? Also, why can't the process be completed if any one of the emails is wrong?? doesn't make really make sense to me.

ANYHOW, I was able to solve the problem by splitting my csv file into multiple files with 50 entries each and uploading each one separately, the thought behind it being that I could find the culprit address that way. In the end I was able to successfully upload all the files and there was no error message. Hope this helps anyone who may have the same problem!

I fixed this problem, when you export your list from any mailing services you will get a csv file. The csv file has alot of columns and squarespace specifically list how to do it in order.

what i did was deleted every single column in the csv file besides the column holding all the emails. Once the emails column is the only column with data (should now show as first column) you'll then proceed to save the file. Now youre all good to upload the csv file. I did this with 40,000 emails i exported from my mailchimp. Hope this helps out.

Commenting here even though the original post is quite old to say that this problem still persists. I get the same error message even after paying for one of the recommended services (BriteVerify) from this help article that support kept referring me to. BriteVerify confirmed that less than 1% of my list was invalid. I removed those addresses and tried to re-upload and still got the same error. 

@StudioPlug's solution of breaking the CSV into smaller parts might be worth a try. It's better than support's only other suggestion which was to manually add each subscriber ONE. BY. ONE. 😲 

@kristine I'd forgotten about this post. Since then, I've run into this problem many times. I've found that if I split the CSV into groups of about 75 I don't get the errors. Hope that works for you as well!

1 hour ago, christyprice said:

I've run into this problem many times. I've found that if I split the CSV into groups of about 75 I don't get the errors.

@christyprice I wish I would have found this thread earlier today because man was this a headache with support to get them to realize that something's not working right! 😬 How can the same list broken up into smaller batches result in no errors when it has the exact same content as the large list? A true mystery! lol 

Anyways, I did the batch thing and finally had success. Also, I sent someone your way to check out your email campaigns course since I know you're the pro at it! Thanks!! 

I'm a bit baffled myself about the limit. How can one person import 40,000 email addresses in one column (email) but others can't import multicolumn csv unless batched in 75 or less? I'm assuming properly formatted csv of course.

Some kind of SS anti-spam technique? Make it painful so that only legitimate folks will stick with it?

35 minutes ago, creedon said:

I'm assuming properly formatted csv of course.

It's so bizarre. Hopefully if more people report that this is an issue it will get some attention! 

I. Am. Livid. 
Trying to upload a list of about 5000+ customers who have agreed to email notifications, from our sales platform.
Can't upload as one list.
Can't upload as 3 lists.
Can't upload as emails only.
Find this thread, follow advice to try 75-row csvs.
Can only upload about 75% of the 50+ different csvs.
Break the failures down into four csvs each to better identify what's wrong with the emails in these lists.
THEY ALL WORK FINE BROKEN DOWN INTO ~20 rows. 
I STILL have NO idea what the criteria are for a failed upload, but at least it's done.
Thanks for wasting my entire afternoon, Squarespace!

@Slaidman all I can say is that I feel you. I went through this same thing and am sad to hear it's still not resolved. It's truly the one failure of Squarespace Campaigns because everything else works great once you're in there. But not being able to easily import from another platform is pure ridiculousness. 

@slaidman @KristineNeilStudio I had a similar issue in which I managed to find a work around. We were trying to  migrating a Squarespace email list to a new Squarespace account however, I kept getting errors when re-uploading the csv to the new Squareapace site.

The fix that I found was opening the file up on my computer, adjusting the columns a bit (as they were a bit truncated on the sides),  and re-saving the file (as a csv file). When I re-uploaded the file It worked. There were about 7000 emails in the list. 

I hope this helps anyone else having a similar issue. I used a mac and also the "numbers" software to re export the csv file. 

I definitely hope Squarespace can resolve this issue soon. Something is really off with the import list issues. 

Cheers, 
Mookey
www.mookeymedia.com

@Mookey thanks for the update on your experience! I should have posted that I have had some better luck with this since my original post -- I recently worked on a client's site that had about 800 subscribers that needed to be imported from Flodesk. I just opened their CSV file in Google sheets, stripped out everything except email, first name, last name and resaved as a fresh CSV. Imported without problems. 🤷‍♀️ Maybe this has been "fixed" even though it was never really acknowledged as a problem? 

I'm having the same issue. Every month I need to update a newly updated, cleansed list from Sales Force and it's rejects me every time, I'm now down to importing 50 at a time, not great when you're paying for the highest level . It's so frustrating because I recommended to my client to use Squarespace now I look like a fool. 

Please Squarespace can engineering looks at this issue?

18 hours ago, Tamara_TheInitiative said:

I need to update a newly updated, cleansed list from Sales Force and it's rejects me every time, I'm now down to importing 50 at a time, not great when you're paying for the highest level . It's so frustrating

There is a known issue with the Campaigns import process and the team is actively working on updates to the process.

To explain, before allowing the email addresses to be added, Squarespace checks each address to ensure it is not on a spam list and meets certain criteria. These checks are supposed to ensure that you do not spam others. However, the algorithm has issues, and is blocking some email addresses that are perfectly valid. When one email address fails, the entire import fails. 

Hallo there. This issue is a real pain. I have built a small FileMaker App, which you can download here: 
https://www.dropbox.com/s/aukoy1wq25dukng/SquareSpaceEmailConverter.fmp12?dl=0

You can download a fully functional trial version of FileMaker here, which runs for 45 days: 
https://www.claris.com/trial/

The tool allows you to import your addresses, splits them in groups (default group size is 75 - you can try other options) and then export these groups for the import into SquareSpace. 
Good luck. 

For those with Unix or Unix like systems checkout the split command. macOS gives you access to the command line via the Terminal application.

This issue is still not fixed, after 3 years. It doesn't look like it will ever be fixed, best use a 3rd party, it's sad as it looks like a good option for Squarespace users, obviously errors were made when building this software and are irreversible.

Correction 4 years