The Scenario
You manage a CRM at a mid-size e-commerce company. Your team is about to import a batch of 50 customers into a Thanks.io mailing list for a re-engagement campaign. The CRM export gave you email addresses in column A of an Excel workbook. Before the import, your operations manager wants to know which of these people already exist as Thanks.io recipients — to avoid duplicating records.
You found out about this check requirement at the end of a Monday standup. The import is supposed to happen today.
The bad version:
- You log into Thanks.io and open the recipient search.
- You copy the first email from the workbook and paste it into the search field.
- You note the result in column B, go back to the workbook, copy the second email, and repeat.
Fifty lookups. Fifty copy-paste cycles. And if the answer is "yes, they exist" you also need the recipient ID for the dedup process.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads every email in column A and queries Thanks.io's recipient search for each one, writing the results back without you leaving the workbook.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and paste this prompt:
For each email in column A of the Check Duplicates worksheet, search Thanks.io recipients by email across the mailing list IDs in the List IDs worksheet and write Exists or New into column B.
SheetXAI queries Thanks.io for every email and marks each row so you can filter immediately.
What You Get
- Column B shows "Exists" or "New" for every row.
- Rows marked "Exists" let you decide whether to skip the import or update those records instead.
- Any email that errors during lookup gets a clear status note.
- All 50 lookups run in one prompt.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
I also need the existing recipient ID when there's a match
Search Thanks.io for each email in column A of the Check Duplicates worksheet using the mailing list IDs from cells E1 through E5 and write the matching recipient ID into column B, or Not Found if no match.
The emails have inconsistent casing
Convert all emails in column A to lowercase, then search Thanks.io recipients for each one using the mailing list IDs in the List IDs worksheet and write Exists or New into column B, plus the recipient ID into column C if found.
I need to check across a single specific list only
For each email in column A of the Check Duplicates worksheet, search Thanks.io recipients in the mailing list ID from cell B1 only and write Exists or New into column B. Write the recipient ID into column C if found.
Clean the email list, remove obvious junk, and run the full dedup check
Remove rows in the Check Duplicates worksheet where column A ends in example.com, strip leading and trailing spaces from all remaining emails in column A, then search Thanks.io recipients for each email using the mailing list IDs in cells E1 through E5. Write Exists or New into column B and the recipient ID into column C if found.
One prompt handles the data cleanup and the full check in a single pass.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your email list workbook — ask it to check every address against Thanks.io and flag which ones already exist as recipients. Once you know which are new, see the mailing list build spoke to load the new batch into Thanks.io in one shot.