Manage your contacts
Your contact overview is the central place to view, search, edit, and manage all the contacts in your Flexmail account. This article walks you through the main actions you can take from here.
The contact overview
Go to Contacts, then All contacts. You will find three tabs:
- Confirmed: all active contacts who can receive your campaigns
- Unconfirmed: contacts who filled in an opt-in form but have not confirmed yet
- Blacklisted: contacts who can no longer receive your campaigns
Each tab shows the email address, name, date added, and language of each contact. The Blacklisted tab also shows the reason and date of blacklisting.
View a contact's detail page
Click any contact's name to open their detail page. Here you will find:
- Their email address
- Their interests
- All default and custom field values
- Their status and how they got it
- The date they were added
- Their language and all sources
- The segments they currently belong to
- Their campaign activity history
Edit a contact
From a contact's detail page, you can edit any field value directly. Click the field you want to change, update the value, and save.
Add a contact to the blacklist
From a contact's detail page, you can manually blacklist them, for example if they asked to be removed but did not click the unsubscribe link. Click the Blacklist button and choose the reason.
Delete a contact
You can delete a contact from their detail page. Deleting a contact removes all their data from your account permanently, including campaign history. This cannot be undone
Attention Deleting a contact is not the same as blacklisting them. A deleted contact can be re-imported and re-emailed if they end up in a future import. If someone has unsubscribed or asked to stop receiving emails, blacklist them instead of deleting them. The blacklist protects you from accidentally emailing them again.
Search and filter contacts
Use the search bar at the top of the contact overview to find contacts by email address or name. You can also filter by language, source, or date added using the filter options.
Export contacts
To export your contact list, use the export option in the contact overview. You can export all contacts or filter to a specific segment first. The export is delivered as a CSV file.
Support tip If you need to regularly work with a specific subset of your contacts, for example contacts added in the last month, create a segment for that group. You can then export or send to that segment at any time without manually filtering each time.
Common mistakes to avoid
Deleting contacts instead of blacklisting them
This is the most common and consequential mistake in contact management. Deleting an unsubscribed contact removes all trace of their opt-out. If they end up in a future import or re-subscribe, their history is gone and you have no record of their previous request to stop receiving emails. Always blacklist opted-out contacts.
Editing contacts individually when a bulk update is more efficient
If you need to update a field for dozens or hundreds of contacts, editing each detail page individually is slow and error-prone. Use a CSV import with the updated values instead. Flexmail will update existing records rather than creating duplicates.
Not using segments for recurring exports
If you regularly need to export a filtered group of contacts, such as everyone with a specific interest or from a specific source, create a segment for that group. Exporting from a saved segment is faster and more reliable than re-applying filters manually each time.
Next steps
- Read "Updating existing contacts" for information on bulk-updating contact data via import
- Read "Manage blacklisted contacts" for a full explanation of the blacklist and what you can do with it
- Read "About segments" to learn how to create dynamic groups for targeted sending and exporting