Data cleaning for CRM imports
Salesforce import errors
Fix "INVALID_EMAIL_ADDRESS" on a Salesforce import
Salesforce rejects rows whose Email field is not a syntactically valid address. It isn't judging whether the mailbox is live, it's checking the shape of the text: a comma where a dot should be, stray spaces, a missing top-level domain. The fix is to repair the format of every address before you import, not one error file at a time after.
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What the error looks like
Why it happens
- Typos: a comma for a dot. name@gmail,com reads fine to a human, but the comma means Salesforce never sees a valid domain.
- Leading or trailing spaces. A space you can't see before or after the address makes the whole value invalid.
- Missing .com. An address that stops at the domain with no top-level domain fails the format check.
- Written as text. "name at domain dot com", collected from a form or scraped, isn't a real address until the words become symbols.
- Multiple emails in one field. Two addresses in a single cell is not one valid address, so the row is rejected.
The manual fix
- Filter or eyeball the Email column and pull out the rows Salesforce flagged.
- Fix the obvious typos by hand: swap the comma back to a dot, trim the spaces, add the missing top-level domain, rewrite "at" and "dot" text as symbols.
- Split multi-value cells so each row carries exactly one address, and decide which one is the primary.
The Sift fix
- Drop your CSV or Excel file into Sift. It runs in your browser; the file is never uploaded.
- Sift's email repair fixes structural typos like a comma for a dot and "at" and "dot" wording, trims whitespace, and lowercases every address.
- Anything it cannot safely repair is flagged to the needs-your-eyes list instead of being guessed at.
- Review every change with a diff so you can see exactly what was touched, then export the clean file.
What Sift can't fix
Honesty matters here: Sift fixes email format and syntax, it does not verify deliverability. It cannot tell you whether the mailbox actually exists, and it cannot catch a perfectly-formatted-but-wrong address, one that is shaped correctly but belongs to the wrong person or a domain that no longer receives mail. That needs an SMTP email-verification service, which is a different tool. Sift gets the format right so Salesforce accepts the row; confirming the address is real and reachable is a separate step.