Download the Mailing List

The list of recipients for sending mailings can be downloaded as a CSV file under List of Contacts → Download Mailing List. CSV files can be opened in all common applications for data processing or spreadsheets (e.g., Excel, OpenOffice Calc, SPSS, …). The file is Unicode-formatted.

The file always contains all of the following columns – regardless of whether the entries contain corresponding information.

A person ID that may have been assigned is not noted in the list, because the collected data would otherwise no longer be anonymous.

• EMAIL The recipient's email address
• PHONE Mobile phone number
• FRSTNAME First name
• LASTNAME Last name
• GENDER Gender of the recipient (to determine the salutation)
  • 1 male
  • 2 female
  • -1 not entered
• TITLE Title (e.g., academic title)
• ALTSALUT Alternative salutation (e.g., “Dear Dr. Miller”). If the alternative salutation is specified, the salutation in the cover letter is not created automatically from name, title, and gender.
• SERIAL Person ID of the participant (only included if the addressee was not imported anonymously)
• SUBGROUP Subgroup to which the recipient has been assigned
• STATUS <n> Participation status for the mailing with the ID <n>
  • 0 The recipient has not received an email yet and has not been assigned a person ID either
  • 1 The recipient has not clicked the link to the questionnaire yet
  • 2 The recipient has visited the questionnaire
  • 3 The recipient has filled out the questionnaire to the end. This code is only available if the access mode “Mailing” was specified for the questionnaire. In the mode “Access code”, the code 2 is retained even if the questionnaire was filled out completely.
  • -1 The email address has been blocked server-wide for receiving mailings (Robinson listing)
  • -2 An error occurred when sending the email; the email was rejected with an error message (e.g., invalid email address or the like)
  • -3 The address was excluded from the dispatch because of a filter in the attached report.
• SENDDATE <n> Date on which the mailing with the ID <n> was sent to the participant\ The dispatch time is given in YMD format (year-month-day).

When downloading the list of contacts, SoSci Survey provides a CSV file that is optimized for Excel (encoding UTF-16 Little Endian). To read the CSV file in R, the fileEncoding must be specified accordingly:

addresses = read.csv("panel.csv", sep="\t", quote = "\"", fileEncoding  = "UTF16LE")

If you omit this encoding, you get the following error:

Error in make.names(col.names, unique = TRUE) : 
  invalid multibyte string at '<ff><fe>

Search terms: participation status, list of contacts, addresses, email addresses