I recently had to upload nearly 5,000 contact entries to a MailChimp list for a new client. MailChimp’s interface, which is great, let me upload tab separated list files with no problems. Great, I thought, until I received an email from MailChimp informing me nearly 500 had been rejected becase they are “role based addresses” (basicaly anything with info@, enquiries@ etc).

I understand that spam is the internet’s biggest problem, but rejected all role based emails without even an interface to pick and select those that were rejected, is simply annoying. I use info@, hello@ email addresses all the time for my personal and client emails, why they should be rejected with no choice is stupid. I would have wandered off else where to another mail client if I hadn’t already paid for a monthly subscription plan. So I had no choice but to manually enter the 500 rejected by hand.

Entering 500 email addresses, with a first name, surname, title and company by hand (which would be a lovely 2,500 copy and paste jobs into a fairly slow interface)? No thanks.

Thanks to the MailChimp API not checking any email addresses, I produced the following script to loop through the rejected email list that MailChimp sent me, and got them all in pretty quickly.

Adjust the script to your needs, just run it from a browser and it will give you a nice output. If you don’t have krumo in your library, replace the krumo calls with var_dump.