We have added a new feature giving you the ability to clean your contact list.
As you should be aware, YouTube limits the number of contacts they display to 5,000. So, even though you may have more than 3,000 contacts you can only send messages to the 5,000 contacts displayed by YouTube.
HOWEVER, the bigger issue is that normally many of the 3,000 listed are not the YT users you want to communicate with. In many cases, they are closed YouTube accounts. In an effort to improve your ability to communicate with the users important to you, our new feature provides a way to streamline and manage your contacts. So, how does the new feature work, you ask?
Before showing you the mechanics of how to use the feature, let's first talk about how we envisioned you would use it. Here are the steps we suggest.
- Delete all closed/suspended accounts from your contact list.
- Create lists of users you do not want to delete from your contact list
- Delete all contacts except for those you do not want to delete by filtering out all users you want to keep
The mechanics of how to use the new feature...
After gathering contact information from Tube Toolbox and YouTube the following screen will be displayed. Click on "Clean Contacts". After the cleaning runs, click on "Re-Synchronize My Contacts". Repeat the Clean Contacts and Re-Synchronize My Contacts clicks until the Clean Contacts does not delete anymore contacts. At that point, all your contacts are active accounts (no closed or suspended YouTube accounts are in your list).
Once you have only active accounts in your contact list, you should use our Gathering Users feature and Manage Lists to create lists of accounts you want to filter from the Clean Contacts deletion process. For example, you may not want to delete any contacts that are in any of the following lists.
- Your Subscribers
- Your "Old" Friends list (assuming you had Tube Toolbox before Friends were eliminated from YouTube)
- Anyone who has commented on your channel
- Anyone who has commented on your videos
- Anyone who has commented on your favorites
- etc.
Hopefully, you get the idea. You want to display a list of all your contacts and then uncheck users based on other lists you have. To do this, you
- Uncheck the "Delete ONLY Closed Accounts" check box
- Check any list you want to uncheck from the to be deleted users
The following image is after unchecking the Delete ONLY check box and selecting the groups we want to filter out from our deletion process.
Finally, the image below displays the users that will be deleted from your contact list after the "Filter out Groups" button was pressed. Notice the reduction in the number selected. The Subscribers and Friends (in this example) were unchecked. NOTE: you may have other lists you want to uncheck, such as a list of everyone who has commented on your channel or videos. You would check the appropriate list in addition to your subscriber and friend list.
At this point you would click on the Clean Contacts and all the checked users will be deleted from your contact list.
You can do the above process multiple times until you end up with 3,000 users that are important to you!