Best Practices for importing (Paper) mailing list with no email addresses into Vin65

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We have a form in our tasting room to sign up for our mailing list. Customers can add either their email address, physical address, or both. We send out a printed newsletter once a year to all of our customers who have listed their address on this sign-up form (we also send the newsletter to our club members). Currently we maintain this list of customer names and physical mailing addresses in an excel spreadsheet (~3 or 4k). I want to import all of these customers to Vin65, so I can more easily manage duplicate contacts/addresses, etc.

I spoke with tech support, and cannot import this list to Vin65 without email addresses. They didn’t offer any suggestions on how to import this list, so my current plan is to batch import with an obviously fake email address (johndoe@deletethisemail.com) for all these customers, and then manually delete all of their email addresses from the new contact. Is there a less time intensive process to accomplish this I am not seeing?

Additionally, if you have any other suggestions, or pitfalls, I would appreciate the advice.

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I use "customer_number@mydomain.com" when I need to make up an email address. I don’t bother to delete them since they are clearly fake by design. You can use +1 in Excel to generate the emails (and customer numbers for that matter). Make it easy on yourself and if your highest customer number is 8457, start the import at 9001, for example.

Also, don’t upload the whole list at once. Start with 10 or so at a time and make sure they all got in OK, before you do the whole (rest of the) wad.

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Similarly to ElJefe, I use addresses at example.com (a domain designed for this)–for one reason or another, it’s always useful to have dummy email addresses.