If you're coming to ReachMail from another Email Service Provider (ESP), you may wish to bring your existing list with you. While most ESPs have very similar policies regarding list collection methods and anit-spam policies we encourage you to review our statement on list collection best practices and our privacy policy to insure that your list is in compliance with our standards. If you have any questions after reviewing these documents, please contact support@reachmail.com.
In most cases, porting a list between other providers and our platform will be a simple case of exporting and importing. It is important however to take care that the correct addresses are brought over. Namely, you'll have to make sure that any opted-out or invalid (hard bounced) addresses are omitted from your list when importing into ReachMail.
Why is this important? These addresses have already been invalidated by your previous email marketing efforts. They've either opted-out of further communication (which must be respected cross-platform) or have been reported as invalid (hard bounced) by the mailbox operator (e.g. Yahoo, Gmail, MSN). You may be familiar with hard bounces by another name, but in short, these addresses have been abanadoned or expressly closed by the end-user. An example would be bob@reachmail.com. There is no Bob here, so messages to that address would be returned as hard bounces. Your other ESP has been tracking these addresses for you and suppressing them from your mailings. Though methods vary, most ESPs will provide an option to export only the active recipients from your lists. These are the addresses you want.
While you may be tempted to include invalid addresses, whether opt-outs or hard bounces, to try to reach old subscribers, we can tell you now that's only a shortcut to account termination.
Once you're satisfied that you have only active addresses in hand, take a look our list upload guide for information on importing them to ReachMail.