How to add Role Based Emails to Mailchimp

For very good reason, many of the good email marketing and newsletter services don’t allow the addition of role based emails as subscribers (e.g. Mailchimp, Aweber and Campaign Monitor). A role based email address is one that starts with something like admin or billing e.g.  admin@example.com is a role based email address.

What happens if I try to add a role based email address as a subscriber?

In Mailchimp you’ll receive a warning when importing subscribers that role based emails are not allowed and the subscribers won’t be added. Even worse, Omnivore, the algorithm that Mailchimp uses to determine how likely your imported subscribers are to be flagged as spammers or malicious email addresses, may determine that your list includes too many role based email addresses and will refuse to import any of your subscribers.

The best course of action is therefore to try to eliminate any role based email addresses before trying to import into your Mailchimp list. But this isn’t always simple to do.

How to add email addresses that Mailchimp won’t import

Mailchimp provides a report when you import subscribers. In this report it will be identified which email addresses have not been imported due to being role-based email addresses. If you click the number of emails that were role-based or known invalid email address(es) a list of the addresses will be provided.

To add the addresses that could not be imported is actually relatively simple; just add the subscribers one at a time (rather than using the import functionality). Be aware however that adding these addresses may well be detrimental to the reputation of your list.

In summary, role-based email addresses can’t be imported however can be added one by one as a subscriber. It is always best however to avoid adding role-based email addresses if at all possible.