For those of you who work with a lot of data in different systems, it is convenient to automate imports into Rule. Data import to Rule can be automated in several ways. One option is via API, which is included free of charge for all Rule customers, more info here.

As an alternative, we also offer the additional service of automated file import via SFTP. It is suitable for those of you who work with files and automatic uploading. The cost for this is 1100 SEK/month.

After the service has been activated, you as a customer will receive a username and password for your SFTP area at Rule. The address to your SFTP area is usually "'sftp:// parser.rule.io/uploads"

You can then upload files once or several times per day so that they are automatically imported into Rule.

As an example, you can upload a file with today's new subscribers every night at 05:00. These will then be automatically imported so that Rule users can work with current data every morning.

In order for the file import to work, the following points must be met:

1. One of the columns 'emailAddress' and 'phone_number' must be present in each file, these are mapped to the system fields Email Address and Phone Number
2. The rest of the columns will be read as custom fields where the column name becomes the name of the custom field. The group will default to "Subscriber" (let us know if you want to use a different group). For example, for the column "name", the subscriber group will be "subscriber" and the custom field will be "name".
3. We recommend the file formats .csv or .txt
4. The columns in the file should be separated by semicolon ";" or tab
5. UTF-8 encoded
6. Terminated strings, i.e. the text is delimited by quotation marks, for example: "First Name";"Last Name"
7. The top row is the header (see example file)
8. 1 row in the file is 1 subscriber that is imported
9. If the subscriber already exists, the custom fields will be updated - duplicates will not be created
10. If the custom field does not already exist in your Rule account, it will be automatically created
11. Automatically created fields will have the type "Text". If you want to change it to, for example, "Date", you can easily do so under the field's settings in Rule.

Here is an example of how an import file can look.

You can also use an sFTP file to delete subscribers, for it to work the file must be named "delete" so for example "20210101000001_Delete.csv".

For the delete file to work, the following points must be met:

1. .csv format
2. The file must contain the header "emailAddress" in column A1
3. No separators like tab or semicolon
4. Only email addresses in column A, no other data

To order automatic file import, contact support@rule.se.