CODEWITHSUNDEEP
mailchimp-api-v3.0
jakob Ruedisser
jakob Ruedisser

Reputation: 11

How to find permanently deleted addresses in mailchimp api V3

is there any way to get a list of all permanetly deletet email addresses?

I am trying to upload large lists of email addresses. with every adress that has been deleted i get an error, then have to remove the address from the upload list, and then start the reupload...

So i want to exclude permanently deleted adresses from my upload list before i even start.

It seems no one had that problem, i cant find any solutions for that. In the api documentation, there are only commands to find ardesses in a list/audience. but it seems deleted adresses are not in any audience or lsit anymore... also the status "permanetly-deleted" doesnt really exist.

br J

Upvotes: 1

Views: 478

Answers (1)

Susan McNab
Susan McNab

Reputation: 11

I have recently been testing a new list myself and came across the deleted address issue. Not aware of any documentation on how to handle this gracefully.

Those addresses can't have been completely deleted if the Mailchimp system can test against it and return an error. If what they have stored is some kind of hash you can still test against it to see if a specific email address was deleted. A more accurate word might be "banned" for a particular audience.

If you test adding a member you will get this response for a "deleted" member:

{
  "title": "Forgotten Email Not Subscribed",
  "status": 400,
  "detail": "[email protected] was permanently deleted and cannot be re-imported. The contact must re-subscribe to get back on the list.",
  "instance": "xxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxx"
}

Except the member cannot resubscribe, and the only way to find out is to attempt to add them using the banned email address, you cannot search by email address. That only leaves some ugly loop solutions as options to solve the problem.

You can add the banned email address to a new Audience/List. Also manual transfers to the old list work regardless of the "Forgotten" (not) email status. That's no help for a large list obviously.

One option could be to pull the entire existing list from Mailchimp, merge the new and existing contacts then upload them all as a new Audience. You would need to attach User Journeys and settings to the new Audience though.

It seems an odd approach and does not really comply with a user request to have data deleted when you think about it.

Upvotes: 1

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