# Mailing lists (your audience) > A mailing list in MailCamp is the container that holds contacts and defines who they hear from. MailCamp has moved to a single audience per account: one place where every contact lives, divided up with segments, tags and topics rather than with separate lists. In the interface a list is mostly called your audience. ## What it is Every contact belongs to a mailing list. The list decides which custom fields exist, which topics contacts can subscribe to, which sender details campaigns go out with, and which language is used as a fallback for imports and forms. MailCamp used to encourage a new list per purpose — one for the newsletter, one for customers, one per event. That works against you: the same person is stored several times (and paid for several times), can receive the same campaign twice, an unsubscribe only applies to the list it happened on, and statistics are split so no report shows the whole picture. The model is now inverted. One audience holds everyone, and the differences between people are described on the contact itself. ## What replaces a second list - **Segments** — a saved filter over the audience, for example everyone in Belgium who clicked in the last 30 days. Membership is recalculated on every send, so it is never stale. - **Tags** — labels you assign yourself, such as `customer`, `partner`, `trade-fair-2026`. This covers most of what a separate list used to be created for. - **Topics** — subscription preferences contacts choose themselves, on your forms or in the preference centre. Each of these can be picked as the recipients of a campaign, exactly as a list could. The difference is that the contact stays a single record. Extra mailing lists remain available on enterprise plans and by arrangement, for audiences that genuinely may not touch: a separate legal entity, a second brand with its own sender identity, a market administered apart. Lists that already exist keep working unchanged — the shift is about what is recommended for new work, not about removing anything. ## Audience settings Reached from **Contacts**. On a single-audience account you open "Audience settings" directly; with several lists you first pick one from the overview. - **Name** — how the audience appears in the interface, pickers and reports. Internal only; it never appears in an email. - **Sender information** — the from-name, sender address and reply-to used by default, plus the postal details that belong at the bottom of a mailing. Recipients see these. - **Language** — the fallback for imports and forms that do not set one themselves, and the language of system pages such as confirmation and unsubscribe. - **Topics** — the subscription preferences contacts can pick; adding one here makes it selectable on every form of this audience. - **Fields** — the custom fields available on contacts in this audience. Sender addresses should live on a domain set up with SPF, DKIM and DMARC. A free address such as a gmail.com one is rejected or filed as spam by many providers. ## Limits and edge cases - A contact belongs to exactly one list, and that assignment is locked once saved. The same person on two lists is two independent contact records, with separate history and field values — and counts twice toward the plan's subscriber meter. - An unsubscribe applies to the list it happened on. Someone who left your newsletter list can still be active on another one, which is exactly the surprise a single audience avoids. - Custom fields, topics, segments and subscribe forms all belong to the list they were made in, and a campaign sends to one list at a time. Spreading contacts over several lists means maintaining all of that several times. - Renaming a topic or removing a field affects every form and campaign that uses it, including personalisation tags in templates, which stop resolving when the field they point at is gone. - The number of lists is plan-bound. When the limit is reached the "New list" button is hidden; on single-audience accounts there is no button at all. - Changing sender identity does not rewrite past campaigns. ## Common workflows ### Consolidating several lists into one audience 1. Export the smaller lists. 2. Import them into the audience you are keeping, giving each import its own tag so the groups stay distinguishable. 3. Duplicate email addresses are merged into one contact during the import. ### Sending to part of the audience Build a segment and select it as the recipients in the campaign wizard, or send to a tag or a topic. That is the direct replacement for picking a separate list. ## Web routes Paths use `:id` as the placeholder for a mailing list's identifier. - `/contacts/lists` — mailing list overview. - `/contacts/lists/new` — create a mailing list (plan permitting). - `/contacts/lists/:id/update` — audience settings. - `/contacts/lists/:id/contacts` — the contacts of one list. - `/contacts/lists/topics` — topics that can be linked to a list. - `/contacts/lists/imports` — imports run against a list. - `/contacts/lists/exports` — finished exports, ready to download. ## Related - [Contacts](/llms/contacts.txt) — what an audience holds. - [Segments](/llms/segments.txt), [Tags](/llms/tags.txt), [Topics](/llms/topics.txt) — what replaced extra lists. - [Custom fields](/llms/custom-fields.txt) — the schema of an audience. - [Forms](/llms/forms.txt) — how new contacts join. - [Imports and exports](/llms/imports-exports.txt) — moving an audience in or out.