Why does my CSV preview show extra columns?

When your CSV preview on the Valid Email Checker upload page shows columns beyond the email column, that is the platform behaving exactly as designed. We preserve every non-email column you ship in and carry it through to the result file alongside the new verification data. The extra columns are a feature, not a parsing mistake.

What gets preserved

During CSV parsing, our uploader identifies the email column and treats every other column as original_data. That data is stored per-row alongside the verification result for that address. When you download the cleaned list from the task detail page, each row in the export contains:

• The email address
• The verification status (Safe, Invalid, Catch-All, etc.)
• The confidence score
• Flag columns (is_safe_to_send, is_free_email, is_disposable, etc.)
• Every original column you uploaded — same headers, same values, in the same row as the matching email

Why this matters

Most teams export from a CRM or ESP with a long set of attributes per contact: first name, last name, signup date, source campaign, list segment, custom tags. After verification, you want to filter that list (drop Invalid and Disposable, keep Safe and Catch-All) and re-import the cleaned subset back into the same system. If we only returned email + status, you would have to do a manual VLOOKUP or join against the original file. By preserving the columns, the export file is a drop-in replacement for the original — same shape, more accuracy.

What you should not see

If the email column itself appears twice in the preview, the CSV likely has two columns whose values look like email addresses (perhaps a primary email and a secondary email). The parser only detects and processes one — see which column does VEC use. If you see garbled text in the extra columns, the CSV encoding is probably not UTF-8 — re-save the file as CSV UTF-8 from Excel or Google Sheets and re-upload.