06. Deleting Lists and/or Contacts

First of all, you can only delete a CSV list or a Smartlist created by you. Any Smartlist auto-generated by MindFire cannot be removed.

Before we learn how to delete lists and contacts, let us briefly discuss the philosophy behind deleting lists and contacts. MindFire allows you to remove lists without removing contacts associated with that list. We always urge you to remove lists that you do not immediately need - just to keep your account organized and the clutter clear. This actually reduces the probability of errors, We discourage deleting contacts because that removes all events associated with it including unsubscribes. In the future, if you were to load a list that had a deleted contact in it, you are starting from scratch with that contact - you have lost all history including unsubscribe requests. We recommend that you do not delete contacts unless you have a really good reason for that. An example of a good reason could be that you have access to a purchased list for three months only and after that three month period, you have to remove the data associated with that list.

In order to remove a list, as shown in the screenshot below, please follow these steps.

(a) Go to the Contact Manager in MindFire and open either the CSV section or My Smartlist section

(b) Click on the list that you want to remove

(c) Click the gear icon at the top right of the list.

(d) This will drop down a menu. Click on DELETE LIST.

This will open uip the dialog box shown below. Clicking on the orange YES button will remove the list and put it in the Trash section of the contact management as shown.

Now this removes the list from your view only and does not delete the actual contacts in that list. You can always bring this list back by (i) going to the Trash section of Contact Management, (ii) opening the appropriate list by clicking on it, (iii) clicking on the gear icon at top right, (iv) clicking on the REINSTATE option from the menu that drops down. This will send the list back to the folder where it originally was.

In order to delete this list and all its contacts permanently, just click on the (v) Permanently Remove this List" option. The other way to permanently remove a list along with all its contacts in the dialog box that comes up when you select the DELETE LIST option in the step (d) above. Just check the box that says: "Delete all contact ....". Please see the image of the dialog box above for clarity.