Import fails

Hi,

I’m currently using Ghost, and I’m considering moving to MailPoet. I have a bunch of subscribers on Ghost already, and I’m trying to import them in MailPoet. But import fails, for very bizarre and unclear reasons.

First thing to consider: these email addresses have been validated in Ghost. People had to confirm their subscription by clicking a link received on their email address.

I exported a list of people currently subscribed in Ghost. It’s a CSV, and I reformatted it so that the CSV fits with what MailPoet expects. But when I import the CSV in MailPoet, only ~40% of the email addresses are imported.

First problem: there is no error message explaining why import partially fails. It makes debugging a lot harder. And considering I’m a solo entrepreneur with limited time, it gives me one reason to stick with Ghost.

I broke down the CSV file into smaller bits to help debug the whole thing. MailPoet refuses to add some addresses because “Aucun abonnement valide n’a été trouvé” (in English, I’m assuming it’s something like “No valid subscription has been found”). But the email address has been validated! This is a very unclear, and very unhelpful, error message.

Even worse, when I try to add the email address manually, it works — but I don’t want to do that, in part because it would be horrendously time consuming, in part because I want to preserve the subscription date.

I have no idea why import fails like this. And honestly, for somebody who is considering becoming a paid MailPoet customer, it’s a really bad first experience with the plugin.

Unrelated, but it’s also extremely confusing that you need to have an account in WordPress.org to contact support when you are on a free plan. I understand support is part of paid plans. But for somebody like me who is testing the water, it’s a very bad and confusing user experience that doesn’t make me super excited about paying MailPoet for anything else.

Olivier