List Detective FAQ

Concerns about List Detective or the email addresses it contains

It's not uncommon to receive concerns about the feature in general or that List Detective prevents mailing to legitimate addresses. Keep in mind:
 

• Our goal is never to filter out any valid addresses. Though rare, it is certainly possible that system limitation or error in judgment might have caused a valid address not to be imported. That is why it is important to review your import status. The Deliverability team is ready and willing to answer any questions.
   
• Keep in mind that list detective is not the only import filter! The system prevents you from uploading addresses that are already unsubscribed. We receive a lot of questions about filtering that turn out to be recipients who have already unsubscribed.
   
• List detective is not a format fixer – the system also kicks out records for bad domains or typos – addresses with commas, spaces, no dot, etc.

How do we tell what is getting filtered?

• Import the data to a list to view the import results. Take your entire list or database, import email address and subscriber key field (if it is required) into a new list in the Marketing Cloud platform. During the import wizard, specify where import report output should be sent. This report output will clearly state which addresses were not imported due to List Detective.
   
• Though we can’t share the whole List Detective data set, we are happy to answer questions about individual entries. Why is this address suppressed? Why is mail to this domain disallowed? This is all logged and can be provided upon request.
   
• If you are adding email addresses to your SFMC-hosted database via API call, make sure your API call process includes error processing and management. If an address is rejected by the API, it will return an error to the user.
   
• If you are adding email addresses individually to a list in the Create Subscriber Wizard, you will see an error that states "Your SPAM filter does not allow this email address and cannot be added".