There are times when you would like to add multiple records at once to an exclusion or blacklist. In such a case you don't want to go about it address by address. Cys allows for uploading a whole list of addresses for exclusion.

Table of contents:

The difference between an exclusion list and a blacklist

The difference between blacklisting and exclusion is that an exclusion is temporary. Before you add addresses to a blacklist, you need to know for how long you would like to exclude them:

An exlusion list is used to deduplicate or to send respondents an email only once a month, for instance. In this case, it is important that there is an expiration time on the exclusion, equal to the date that you state in the screenshot on "expires on".

A blacklist is used to permanently exclude respondents from participating ever again, even in case of reminders for a survey the respondent has already been invited to. For this reason a blacklist has no need for an expiry date.

Finding the correct blacklist

If you are using multiple projects, you are likely to have multiple blacklists or exclusion lists as well.  On the scheduler tab of your personal email scheduler you will find which blacklists are connected to a project, and which list you should add the addresses to if you want to exclude them from a particular project.

Next go to the Blacklist section of the Data Garden and edit the matching blacklist:

Using the right file format

Click on "Edit Blacklist".

As soon as the page is loaded, with the addresses that are already in there click on the "Import" button in the top right corner.

You will receive a pop-up notification, which asks you to upload the file. Below the selection box there is a phrase that says "download sample CSV/Excel". Depending on your preferred method, you can either click on csv or on Excel. You will then receive an example file downloaded with the format that the file with the email addresses to be excluded must comply with.

To make it easy, you can just delete the data in the sample file and paste and save the appropriate data from your file.

Please note that if you are importing addresses into a blacklist, you will not want the exclusion to end, so the "Expires" column needs to remain empty. (However, keep the column name itself).

If you want to import addresses into a (temporary) exclusion list, you will need to fill the Expires column with the desired enddate.

Importing the file

If you have filled in the sample file correctly, you can continue working in the pop-up. Click in the gray box and you can choose the file from your computer that you just created. You can close the pop-up.

And voilà, your email addresses have been read in! These peole will be excluded from participation in the (near) futurue.

For more ways of excluding respondents from receiving an invitation, please take a look at this article.