Mass delete users in Acymailing

This old lady is actually a spammer
She's just happy she made the cut

This is one of those tips which you might never need in your entire life, but I’ll share it anyway.  But first, the traditional backstory.

Some time ago, my employer inherited what was said to be a popular news portal site for the elder.  We soon learned that the popularity was grossly exaggerated.  Part of our inheritance was a mailing list with 6000+ users.  Naive as we were, we loaded that list into Acymailing – the Joomla! component we use(d) for sending our newsletters.

We soon learned that many of those e-mail adresses weren’t “real”.  Most of them came from spammers.  And, after our first mailing, we realized that thousands of those adresses no longer existed.  So, of course, we wanted to get rid of them – but scraping those invalid e-mail adresses was a lot of hard work.

This week, we finally gathered all those invalid e-mail adresses, but we saw no clear way to mass delete them. Until I came up with a plan.  A plan that might be useful for you – unless you rather rely on the search function and delete all e-mail adresses one by one…

Instructions

Create a CSV file

To start, you need a CSV file.  Nothing fancy.  Just put email in the first line; and in the next lines put the e-mail adresses you want to (easily) delete.  Remember, one e-mail adress per line!  This could be done in notepad, in a text editor or even excel.  Just remember to save the file as a CSV file.

Create a new list in Acymailing

When your .CSV file is complete, it’s time to create a new list in Acymailing.  This is important, we’ll use this list as a filter for the ‘bad’ e-mail adresses we want to delete.

  • Go to Components > Acymailing > Lists
  • Click “new” and give the list a clear name, like “Delete”.

Import the users

Next, we’re going to import the users.  In Acymailing, go to the “Users” tab and click “Import.”

In the import screen, make sure to select File under Import users from.  Then, using the field below, select the file stored on your computer.  Then, move on to Subscribe imported users to.  Choose the ‘special list’ you created, and set it to “Yes.”  Proceed with importing the users.

Delete them without mercy

You’ve saved yourself a lot of time by now, because you didn’t have to search all those e-mail adresses yourself.  Acymailings Import function added all the e-mail adresses to your “Delete” list.  Now, all that’s left to do is delete them all.

Go to the users list, and filter the list filter to show only those users you want to delete. (Click “All Lists” and select your list instead).

Now, start deleting those users!  In my case, it worked best to display 100 users at a time, select them all and delete them all at once.  While you could use the “Process” option to delete them, it’s easier to simply click “Delete”.

And that’s it!  You’ve now deleted those good-for-nothing e-mail adresses with ease!

I realize chances are slim anyone will ever need to use this trick, as it’s an unusual situation.  But if this post ever saved you a lot of time, leave a comment!

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