Freshsales: Export, Verify and Re-Import Contacts Before Email Gets Suspended

To keep a Freshsales account from hitting its bounce limits, export your contacts, verify the email addresses, and re-import the results with Update only your existing records so each contact gets a status without creating duplicates. Then email only the valid group. Freshsales warns at a 5% bounce rate and says it suspends the email feature at 10%, and only support can switch it back on.

Everything below is from Freshworks' CRM help pages, read on 2 November 2026.

Freshsales' bounce rules

From why is my email feature disabled:

• "Whenever the bounce rate of your emails crosses 5%, you will see a warning message."
• "When your bounce rate crosses 10%, your email feature will be suspended indefinitely."
• The rate is calculated daily over the past 7 days.
• The same page also lists a tiered rule: suspension when the rate "exceeds 20% if the total number of emails sent in last 7 days ranges from 49 to 499", and exceeds 10% above 499.
• To get it re-enabled: "Clean up your junk contacts" and email Freshworks CRM support.

Campaigns have their own safeguard. Freshworks says campaigns "will be stopped when the system detects high bounce rate/ spam complaints", and that if more than two campaigns are stopped, outgoing email for the account is temporarily disabled (campaign sending).

The window is seven days, so one bulk send to an old list can lock email for the whole sales team. Bounces from individual reps' sequences count too.

How Freshsales treats bounced contacts

Freshworks says that soft bounces keep receiving mail, while contacts whose status is Not subscribed, Unsubscribed, Reported as spam or Bounced are blocked as recipients on future emails (bounce handling).

That only protects you after an address has bounced once. Every stale contact still costs one bounce before it gets blocked. Verification moves that discovery to before the send.

Step 1: Export the contacts

Everything. From export all data:

1. Go to Admin Settings, then Account, then Export data.
2. Choose the time period and tick the Contacts module (and Leads, if you use them).
3. Click Export. A zip file arrives by email.

You can run up to five exports a day, and the full time range only once.

A filtered set. To export only, say, contacts owned by one team or created before this year, build an Analytics report on the Contacts metric with your filters, then use the widget's three-dot menu to export the tabular data as CSV. Analytics exports also arrive by email (export reports).

Make sure the export includes the Freshworks CRM ID and the Email column. You need one of them to match records on the way back in.

Step 2: Remove rows you will not email

Before verifying, take out:

• Contacts already Bounced, Unsubscribed or Reported as spam. Filter the contacts list by Subscription Status to see them. They are blocked anyway, and checking them uses credits for nothing.
• Contacts without an email address, common in CRMs where reps log phone-only leads.
• Duplicates. Remove duplicate emails collapses case variants like Jane@Acme.com and jane@acme.com.

Keep the rest of the columns out of the file you verify if you like; only ID and email are needed. The CRM export to email list tool pulls those columns out of a wide CRM export.

Step 3: Verify

Upload the file on the verify page. Each address gets a live mailbox check and the ID column stays next to it. To try a sample first, use the CSV email verifier.

Result	What to do in Freshsales
Valid	Set your status field to Valid; email normally
Catch-all	Set status to Catch-all; keep out of bulk campaigns or send in small batches
Unknown	Set status to Unknown; re-check later
Invalid	Set status to Invalid; exclude from all email, find a new address if the contact matters
Disposable	Treat as invalid for sales email

B2B CRMs collect catch-all domains: company mail servers that accept every address during the check. Those are the contacts most likely to bounce after a "valid-looking" check. What is a catch-all domain explains why no verifier can confirm them.

Step 4: Add a field for the result

In Freshsales, create a custom contact field, for example a dropdown called Email check with the values Valid, Catch-all, Unknown and Invalid, and a date field called Email checked on. A field is easier to filter on than tags, and it survives the next import.

Step 5: Re-import only the results

From the import guide and import FAQ:

1. Build a file with three or four columns: Freshworks CRM ID (or Email), Last name, Email check and Email checked on. Freshsales requires the last name to be mapped.
2. Keep the file to 5MB or less.
3. Go to Contacts, then Import Contacts, then CSV/XLSX.
4. Upload, map the columns, and choose the date format.
5. Pick Update only your existing records. Freshworks describes it as not adding any new records.
6. Set the matching field to Freshworks CRM ID or Email.
7. Click Import Now and check the summary email.

Mapping only these columns means the import cannot overwrite a phone number or owner a rep changed after your export.

For small fixes, the bulk tray's Update field action sets one field on many selected contacts at once (bulk actions).

Step 6: Use the field everywhere you send

• Add Email check is Valid to every campaign audience and sequence enrolment filter.
• Set invalid contacts' subscription status to stop email entirely, using Update field.
• Build a view of Email check is empty so new contacts get checked before their first email.

Freshworks' own guidance asks for contacts "collected by your business with the consent of the recipient" and to "Remove all stale contacts". The field above is how you find them.

Keep it from creeping back up

Contact data in a B2B CRM goes stale as people change jobs; B2B contact data decay covers the rate. Re-check contacts before any campaign to a segment you have not emailed in a few months, and check new leads as they come in. The email verification API can do that from a Freshsales workflow webhook or a Zapier step.

Checklist

• Export includes Freshworks CRM ID and Email
• Bounced, unsubscribed and spam-reported contacts left out of the check
• Every address verified
• Email check and checked-on fields created
• Results re-imported with Update only your existing records
• Campaigns and sequences filtered to Email check = Valid

Verify your Freshsales export

Upload your export on the verify page. You get 100 free email checks when you sign in with Google, no card, enough to see how a sample of the CRM holds up before you check the rest. For bigger databases, monthly plans are on the pricing page.