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Why did I get an error message when I uploaded my spreadsheet of emails?

Please find your error message below and read the advice underneath the appropriate header with information on how to fix the issue you are seeing.

When error message displays: “First Name / Email column could not be found." 

This means that our system could not find a column labelled "First Name" and/or a column labelled "Email" in the spreadsheet you uploaded. These must be an exact match. 

Please check that cell A1 in your spreadsheet is labelled "First Name" and cell B1 in your spreadsheet is labelled "Email". 

If you continue to get this error after you have made this change, please email your account manager who will be able to look into this error.  

When error message displays: “There were no records in the file." 

This means that you do have a column labelled "First Name" in cell A1 and a column labelled "Email" in cell A2, but you have no data beneath these columns, i.e. there are no first names or email addresses to send an email to. 

To fix this, check your spreadsheet has the first names listed underneath the "First Name" column and email addresses listed underneath the "Email" column. 

If you continue to get this error after you have made this change, please email your account manager who will be able to look into this error.  

When error message displays: “Instances of invalid emails" or “Instances of invalid first names"

This means that our system has found invalid characters in the column labelled "First Name" or invalid emails in the column labelled "Email". 

Invalid characters means that you may have numbers or symbols (e.g. "!" or "$") in the First Name column where we were only expecting letters. Please check the column of first names and remove any special characters, such that it only contains letters. 

Invalid emails means that you have email addresses in the Email column that don't meet our criteria of a valid email, such as do not contain ".com" or ".co.uk" or ".io" at the end or do not include an "@" within the email that we would expect to see. Please check the columns of emails to make sure they adhere to standard email format. If there is an email format that you would expect us to accept that maybe falls out of a "standard" email format, then please let your account manager know and we can look into this error. 

Once you have made any changes to your spreadsheet, please re-upload. If you continue to get this error, please email your account manager who will be able to look into it. 

When error message displays: “File {name} is too large to be uploaded, must be smaller than 4MB."

This means that the spreadsheet you have uploaded is too large. This likely means that you may have other tabs in the spreadsheet (please note, there should only be one tab with first names and email addresses) or perhaps you have an image somewhere in the file. 

To fix this issue, please check there are only two columns of information. To be sure, you can delete all the columns that are not "First Name" and "Email" and delete all empty rows after you resident information. 

Once you have made any changes to your spreadsheet, please re-upload. If you continue to get this error, please email your account manager who will be able to look into it. 

When error message displays: “Email limit exceeded. Must be below 10,000 emails."

This means that the spreadsheet you have uploaded is too large for us to process in one go. Our system checks to see how many rows have information in your spreadsheet and if you exceed 10,000 rows then this error occurs. 

To fix this error, please reduce the number of rows in your spreadsheet. If you would like to send more than 10,000 emails, you will have to create multiple spreadsheets and send them in multiple outreach templates. If you would like any help with this, please reach out to your account manager and they can help you. 

If you do not have 10,000 rows of information, then it may be that our system is seeing some rows "in use" where the cells may have previously been active. A way to remove this is to delete the rows after your data ends to be sure our system only sees the active cells. Once you have done this, please re-upload the spreadsheet. 

If you would like any further help with this error, please reach out to your account manager who will be able to help you. 

When error message displays: “Error with upload please try again."

There are a few reasons why this error may display:

  • Your session has timed out. You may have started putting together a resident outreach template and you didn't complete the upload of the spreadsheet or press send before your session timed out. If you think this may be the case, then please try going through the process again.
  • The spreadsheet you uploaded is too large, such that there may be multiple sheets or images in the spreadsheet that it is making it too large for us to process. Please only upload a spreadsheet with two columns of data, one with first names and the second with the emails you would like to send an email to. Please try re-uploading the spreadsheet.
  • There was a loss of connectivity while you were uploading the spreadsheet. If you think this may be the case, please try uploading the spreadsheet again. 


If after a few attempts of trying to upload the spreadsheet you continue to get this error, please let your account manager know and they will be able to look into this for you.