Can I download my contacts, with who I'm allowed to email?
Your contact book is yours. You can take a copy at any time - to keep, to audit, or to carry to another service - and the copy says who you are allowed to email and why, not just who you know.
Open Community, then Contacts, and use the buttons at the top of the list.
The two files
Export gives you the whole contact book. Alongside name, email, phone, notes and tags, every row carries five more columns:
- can_email - yes or no. Nothing else in the file overrides it.
- email_status - the reason, in words: said yes on a form, confirmed, bought something, said yes on a form, not confirmed yet, no permission recorded, unsubscribed, address retired after bounce, complained, blocked by you.
- email_status_date - the day that evidence happened, written as year-month-day so any spreadsheet reads it.
- consent_source - where the permission came from: the name of the form, the word purchase, or the previous provider it was brought over from. Where the record is too old to say which, it reads not recorded rather than guessing.
- unsubscribed_at - the day they unsubscribed, if they did.
Do not email list only gives you the other half on its own: address, reason, date. It includes addresses that were never contacts - someone can unsubscribe from an email without ever having been in your book - which is exactly why it is a separate file.
Why the people who left are still in the file
It is tempting to hand over only the people you can write to. Do that and the next service starts with a clean list and no memory: the first campaign it sends goes to everybody who ever unsubscribed from you. Keeping them in, marked no, is what makes the export safe to use rather than a liability. If you are moving, load the do-not-email file into the other service's exclusion list before you upload anybody.
What the columns cannot tell you
The file records the evidence bernard holds. It does not invent any. A contact you typed in yourself, or imported from a spreadsheet, reads as no permission recorded - because that is true, and an import never grants permission to email. See When do I need someone's permission to email them? for the ways somebody says yes, and Where do the people who buy, join or ask end up? for how the book fills itself in the first place.
The order of the rows
Oldest first. Every row is written in the order the contact joined your book, so the file reads as a history and two exports taken a week apart line up against each other.
A note on size
The export is built in one pass and refuses rather than quietly cutting the list short, so a file that arrives is a complete file. Above 50,000 contacts one download stops being safe, and bernard says so plainly instead of handing you a short file. Get in touch and we will sort it out with you.
The prompt
“Export the contacts for [my site] with the consent columns, and give me the do-not-email list on its own too.”
Press Copy, then paste it into your AI and fill in the [bracketed] parts. First time? Connect your AI to bernard first - a one-time setup in bernard → your site → Use your own AI.
Questions people ask
- What is actually in the file?
- Ten columns. The five you would expect - name, email, phone, notes, tags - and then five that carry permission: can_email (yes or no), email_status (the reason in plain words), email_status_date (when that evidence happened), consent_source (the form, a purchase, or a previous provider) and unsubscribed_at. Downloading only reads your records, so there is nothing to approve and nothing changes.
- Are people who unsubscribed left out of the file?
- No, and that is deliberate. Anyone who unsubscribed, complained, bounced or was blocked by you is in the file with can_email set to no, and the reason beside them. If they were missing, the next service you upload the list to would have no idea they had ever left, and would email them.
- I want to give another provider my exclusion list first. Can I?
- Yes. The second download, Do not email list only, is that list on its own: the address, every reason standing against it, and the date. Load it into the other service's exclusion list before you upload anybody, and nobody who has left hears from you by accident.
- What order are the rows in?
- Oldest first, by the day each person joined your contact book. Two exports taken a week apart line up against each other, so you can see what changed.
- Why does someone show a date but still say they cannot be emailed?
- Because the evidence is real but incomplete. Someone who ticked a box on a form but never clicked the confirmation link reads as said yes on a form, not confirmed yet. Someone whose consent was recorded before confirmation was required reads that way too. Both keep their date; neither is in a campaign audience until they confirm.
- Is the answer in the file the same one bernard uses when sending?
- Yes. The can_email column is read from the same record that decides every campaign audience, so the file cannot flatter your list. If the file says no, nothing bernard sends will reach that person either.