Contacts without Channel Addesses not working properly Record Count 0

Question

I have been trying to delete Contacts from our Parent BU, which is as far I know the only BU where you can run an Automation with Data Extract "Contacts without Channel Addresses".

The Problem I am getting is that the Record Count of this Data Extract is 0, I have 1 million Contacts and run a query to get my Subscribers which are around 400.000.

SELECT 
    s.SubscriberKey,
    s.DateJoined
FROM _Subscribers s

Why is the Data extract "Contacts without Channel Addresses" not showing me the 600.000 Contacts that do not have any channel?

PS: I took into account the 24h run advice without any success.

Answer 1

I think you are a little bit confused about those two terms:

• Contacts Without Channel Address -

Find and manage your contacts that aren’t associated with any channels.

• All Subscriber list -

Subscribers stored on data extensions join the All Subscribers list when you send your first message to that subscriber.

In other words, in the All Subscribers list, we have contacts who have been added automatically by receiving an email or simply were added to the list manually. Now, in the Contacts Without Channel Address Data Extract, you retrieve contacts who do not have email addresses, mobile phones or any other channel-specific identifiers, therefore all 1 million of your contacts have some kind of channel address but only 400k of them have been added to the All Subscribers list because you probably sent them an email.

If you want to find those 600k records that are not in the All Subscribers list, you would need to do that:

1. Create a Mobile Fitlered List of All Contacts. Read this article, it would help.
2. Query that as a normal Data Extension and apply Left Exclusion Join to remove 400k of records coming from the All Subscribers list.