Definitely an “Oops” kind of moment, and you wouldn’t be the first person to have done this, but what can be done if you accidentally or unintentionally delete a list?
All is not necessarily lost, but time can be of the essence. We do have the ability to recover data from the database in our backup data center, and if you find out you did this *just now* and contact us *right now* and it is during business hours, we can get the data from the primary database, but the timing has to be perfect for that window, which isn’t likely.
Retrieving the data from a backup copy of the database will take some time. There is a more “here and now” option that may work for you. The conditions for this situation are:
1) your list only had email addresses in it (no firstname, lastname, etc. fields)
2) you used the list and only that list in a recent campaign
3) you didn’t apply any list filtering (i.e., you sent to the entire list as a whole, not a segment of it)
The workaround is to look at the Recipients column in the Broadcast Dashboard Reports section. You can download the recipient list, remove some extraneous columns, and then upload that new list back into the original list (or re-create the list name in case you deleted the list instead of truncating all of its members). The reason why only emailaddress is recovered is because only that field is used for reporting purposes.
Once you click on the Recipient count, click the Envelope icon at the top right and select a delivery option. You can also choose to use the recipients in opens and clicks as the basis of your new list (if that is the relevant part of your list you want to recover).
In one sense, this new list will be cleaner than the original list because what you see in the recipients report are the addresses JangoMail sent to AFTER removing bounces, unsubscribed address, and duplicates.
Another option is if you have the original source file where you uploaded the list to begin with. The unsubs and bounces will still be flagged/removed before sending, but if you had any new members added since the upload, those will need to be added back by some other means. For example, if you used an autoresponder and a web opt-in form and were sending a welcome message to new members, you’ll have the recipient emailaddress in Reports. Granted, it may be tedious to extract all of those single addresses one at a time, so if that is the case for you, we can also do that via a backend query on our end.