The Scenario
A growth marketer got a list of 500 email addresses from a co-marketing partner. Before spending an afternoon uploading them to Mailsoftly, she needs to know which ones are already contacts and which are genuinely new. Creating duplicates in Mailsoftly means double-counting the list size and potentially sending the same email twice.
She opened an Excel workbook, pasted all 500 emails into column A, and now needs EXISTS or NEW in column B — fast.
The bad version:
- Go to Mailsoftly's contact search, paste the first email, note the result, type NEW or EXISTS in the workbook, go back, paste the second email.
- Repeat 499 more times.
- Lose track of which browser tab is which around email 80 and start questioning whether the result in the workbook matches what Mailsoftly actually showed.
The co-marketing partner is waiting to hear which contacts they can hand over. The audit is blocking everything else.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook. Through its Mailsoftly integration, it can run a batch lookup across all 500 emails and write the result into column B in one pass.
Open the workbook with your email list and run this prompt:
For each email in column A, search Mailsoftly to see if that contact already exists and write 'EXISTS' or 'NEW' into column B
What You Get
- All 500 rows checked against Mailsoftly's contact database in sequence.
- Column B filled with EXISTS for matches and NEW for emails with no corresponding contact record.
- A lookup result that took one prompt instead of 500 manual searches.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
You also want the existing contact's ID pulled into the workbook
Knowing it exists isn't enough — you want the ID so you can reference it for a follow-up tag assignment.
Look up each email in column A against Mailsoftly contacts and write the existing contact's ID into column B if found, or 'NOT FOUND' if not. Write the contact's current tags into column C as well.
Some emails in the list have inconsistent casing or trailing spaces
The partner's export isn't clean. Some emails are uppercase, some have extra whitespace, and you don't want those to incorrectly register as NEW.
Normalize all email addresses in column A by trimming whitespace and converting to lowercase before searching Mailsoftly. Write EXISTS or NEW into column B. Write the normalized email into column C so you can see what was actually searched.
You want to separate the list into two worksheets — one for new contacts, one for existing
Instead of flags in a column, you want two separate outputs for the import team to work from.
Search Mailsoftly for each email in column A. Copy all rows where the contact does not exist to a new worksheet called 'New Contacts'. Copy all rows where the contact already exists, along with their Mailsoftly ID, to a new worksheet called 'Existing Contacts'.
Normalize emails, run the lookup, flag duplicates within the list itself, and split into worksheets
The list from the partner has some internal duplicates on top of potentially overlapping with Mailsoftly. You want all of it sorted out in one operation.
First, deduplicate the email list in column A, keeping the first occurrence of each. Normalize all emails to lowercase. Then search Mailsoftly for each. Write EXISTS or NEW into column B. Flag any emails that were duplicated within the original list in column C with 'LIST-DUPE'. Copy clean NEW records to a worksheet called 'To Import' and EXISTS records to a worksheet called 'Already In Mailsoftly'.
That's deduplication, normalization, existence check, and routing — one prompt.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with a batch of email addresses you need to vet before an import, then ask it to run the full existence check against Mailsoftly. See also: Bulk import contacts into Mailsoftly and the Mailsoftly overview.