Create a list

    Set up a contact list in IGSendMail, choose the sender and footer details it carries, and decide when to use one list versus several.

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    A list is the container your contacts live in. Every campaign you send goes to a list, or to a segment of one. When you finish this page you will have a list ready to receive contacts, with the sender identity and footer details that campaigns to that list will inherit.

    Before you start

    Have the postal address you want in your email footer to hand, and decide which address replies should go to. Both are list settings, and both are easier to set once than to correct across a dozen campaigns later.

    What a list is for#

    A list groups contacts that share a relationship with you: people who signed up for your newsletter, customers who bought something, attendees of an event. Contacts belong to a list. Their subscription status, the custom field values you store about them, and their signup date all live on that list.

    Two things follow from that. Sending always starts from a list, so a contact who is on no list cannot receive a campaign. And the same person can exist on two lists as two separate records, each with its own status and its own field values.

    One list or several#

    Most accounts need fewer lists than they expect. The usual instinct is to create a list per audience slice: one for customers, one for prospects, one per country. That works, but it makes a lot of things harder.

    Keep audiences in one list when:

    • They should never receive the same email twice. Two lists mean two records, and a person on both gets two copies of a campaign sent to each.
    • You want a single unsubscribe to be honored everywhere. An unsubscribe applies to the list it happened on.
    • The difference between the groups is a property of the contact, such as country, plan, or purchase date. That is a field, and a filter over that field is a segment.

    Use separate lists when the audiences are genuinely unrelated and would never appear in the same campaign: a customer list and a list for a different brand you run, for instance, or a transactional announcements list that people opt into separately.

    Tip

    If you are about to create your fourth list this week, stop and look at segments instead. Segments cost nothing, stay current on their own, and do not fragment your unsubscribe record.

    Create the list#

    Open Lists and start a new list

    Go to Lists and choose the option to create a new list. You will name it and fill in the details below before it is saved.

    Name it for the audience, not the campaign

    The name is internal. "Newsletter subscribers" ages well. "September promo" does not, because you will send the October promo to the same people.

    Set the default sender name and address

    These are the From name and From address that campaigns to this list start with. Use a name a recipient will recognize at a glance in an inbox list, usually your company or a person at your company. Use a sending address on a domain you have authenticated.

    Set the reply-to address

    Replies to your campaigns go here. Point it at an inbox a human reads. An address that bounces replies is worse than no campaign at all, and mailbox providers do notice when recipients cannot reply.

    Fill in the contact and company details for the footer

    The company name, postal address, city, and country you enter here are what appears in the footer of emails sent to this list. This is a legal requirement in most jurisdictions, so put your real registered or business address in. A PO box or a mail-forwarding address is acceptable in many places if you do not want to publish a home address.

    Save, then add contacts

    Once the list exists you can import contacts into it, add them one at a time, or point a signup form at it.

    Sender identity and authentication#

    The sender address on a list needs to be on a domain you have authenticated with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records. Setting a From address on a domain you do not control, or one you have not authenticated, is the fastest way to land in spam folders.

    If you have not set that up yet, do it before your first real send. The list will save fine either way, but delivery will suffer.

    Changing list settings later#

    List settings are defaults, not locks. Changing the sender name on a list changes what new campaigns start with. Campaigns you have already built keep the values they were created with, so check an existing draft after you change a list default if you expect the new value to apply.

    The footer details are different. Because they are pulled from the list at send time, correcting a wrong postal address on the list corrects it for future sends to that list without you editing each campaign.

    What to do next#

    Your list is empty until you put contacts in it. Import an existing file, define the fields you want to store, or publish a form so people can add themselves.

    Import contacts

    Bring an existing CSV of contacts into the list.

    Custom fields

    Decide what you store about each contact.

    Create a signup form

    Let people subscribe themselves.

    Last updated September 10, 2026

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