Body: <p>I'm trying to import about 500 contacts from a CSV. About 20% of them only have an email address, some have email and either a first or last name, most have all three. The default import method is rejecting a chunk of the records telling me that they need either a first and last name or an email address. All of my records have an email address.</p>
  <p>In terms of the detail, I'm avoiding any deduplication on import and so not selecting any matching rule. To see if this made any difference I did select the default email only matching rule and that made no difference to my results.</p>
  <p>I've read other posts here and elsewhere that indicate, as suggested in the error report that my import attempts generate, that either first and last name is required, or an email address, but my experience seems to indicate that in reality all three are required.</p>
  <p>Which is of course nonsensical and deeply unhelpful. From what I can see my only option now seems to be to fill in the empty first and last name fields with placeholder text to get past the broken validation check, and then clean it all up post import.</p>
  <p>Am I doing something wrong or is the default import broken? This is using Civi 5.37.0 - just about to update before trying again in case it's a known and fixed issue.</p>
  <p>Update: now updated Civi to the current version - 5.39 - and it's still broken.</p>
  
Comments.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 4.0
Comments.CreationDate: 2021-07-22T15:03:27.733Z
Comments.Text: If I remember right this has to do with the settings for the Unsupervised rule, regardless of what you choose for dedupe on the import screen.
Comments.UserDisplayName: Demerit
Comments.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 4.0
Comments.CreationDate: 2021-07-23T12:34:56.420Z
Comments.Text: Thanks, I'll take a closer look at that. I'm just working with defaults, which it seems fair to assume would not result in an apparent broken import mechanism.
Comments.UserDisplayName: Graham
Comments.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 4.0
Comments.CreationDate: 2021-07-28T15:54:41.443Z
Comments.Text: I suspect that the error is in your input data, and CiviCRM is misrepresenting the error. Try looking at some of the rows for which civicrm is identifying errors and see if there are in fact, perhaps, errors of a different flavour (e.g. a badly formatted email address). Perhaps CiviCRM is parsing your data in a way different from what you expect, e.g. issues of character sets, quotes, commas, etc.
Comments.UserDisplayName: Alan Dixon
Comments.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 4.0
Comments.CreationDate: 2021-07-30T11:40:44.380Z
Comments.Text: Thanks Alan. All my data is clean and good and very throughly checked and formatted into CSV. Based on years of working with CiviCRM imports I know only too well how intolerant it is to minor issues.
Comments.UserDisplayName: Graham
Tags: <contacts><import><data-import>
Title: How can I import contact records where I only have an email address?
ThreadText: # How can I import contact records where I only have an email address?
  
  (Asked by: username_0 on 2021-07-22)
  
  I'm trying to import about 500 contacts from a CSV. About 20% of them only have an email address, some have email and either a first or last name, most have all three. The default import method is rejecting a chunk of the records telling me that they need either a first and last name or an email address. All of my records have an email address.
  
  In terms of the detail, I'm avoiding any deduplication on import and so not selecting any matching rule. To see if this made any difference I did select the default email only matching rule and that made no difference to my results.
  
  I've read other posts here and elsewhere that indicate, as suggested in the error report that my import attempts generate, that either first and last name is required, or an email address, but my experience seems to indicate that in reality all three are required.
  
  Which is of course nonsensical and deeply unhelpful. From what I can see my only option now seems to be to fill in the empty first and last name fields with placeholder text to get past the broken validation check, and then clean it all up post import.
  
  Am I doing something wrong or is the default import broken? This is using Civi 5.37.0 - just about to update before trying again in case it's a known and fixed issue.
  
  Update: now updated Civi to the current version - 5.39 - and it's still broken.
  
  **Tags:** contacts, import, data-import
  
  > **Comments:**
  > **username_1**: If I remember right this has to do with the settings for the Unsupervised rule, regardless of what you choose for dedupe on the import screen.  
  > **username_0**: Thanks, I'll take a closer look at that. I'm just working with defaults, which it seems fair to assume would not result in an apparent broken import mechanism.  
  > **username_2**: I suspect that the error is in your input data, and CiviCRM is misrepresenting the error. Try looking at some of the rows for which civicrm is identifying errors and see if there are in fact, perhaps, errors of a different flavour (e.g. a badly formatted email address). Perhaps CiviCRM is parsing your data in a way different from what you expect, e.g. issues of character sets, quotes, commas, etc.  
  > **username_0**: Thanks Alan. All my data is clean and good and very throughly checked and formatted into CSV. Based on years of working with CiviCRM imports I know only too well how intolerant it is to minor issues.  
  
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  ## 0 answers
  
  