How to add a new list in VICIdial

A list in VICIdial is a labeled bucket that holds your phone records. Every Lead in the system belongs to exactly one list, and a list is what you attach to a Campaign so the dialer knows what numbers to call. Before any calling can happen, you need a list to pour those records into.

If you are new to all of this, start with the lists and leads guide for the full picture, then come back here when you are ready to make your first one.

Getting to the Add List screen

Open the LISTS section from the left side of the admin screen. You will see every list already in the system with its ID, name, the campaign it belongs to, and its active status. At the top of that table is an ADD NEW LIST link. Click it and you land on a short form with two fields you absolutely must fill in: the list ID and the list name.

The list name is just a short description, between 2 and 20 characters, so you can recognize it later. The list ID is where people get stuck, because it follows strict rules.

The list ID rules

• Numbers only — no spaces, letters, or punctuation.
• Between 3 and 8 characters in length.
• It cannot start with a zero, and it must be greater than 99.
• It must be unique — no two lists can share the same ID.

What happens after you save

Once the list exists, it is empty. You assign it to a campaign and load records into it, and only then does the dialer start feeding numbers into the Hopper — the short queue of leads waiting to be dialed. From there the campaign's dial method and statuses decide which records actually go out the door.

flowchart TD
  A[ADD NEW LIST link] --> B[Set list ID + name]
  B --> C{Valid ID?}
  C -->|No| B
  C -->|Yes| D[List saved empty]
  D --> E[Assign to campaign]
  E --> F[Load leads]
  F --> G[Hopper feeds the dialer]

A common first question is whether the list and the records are the same thing — they are not. The list is the container; the records are what you put inside. For a deeper look at the container itself, see what a VICIdial list is.

One more habit worth forming: pick a naming scheme for your list IDs before you create your tenth list, not after. Because the ID is permanent and numeric, a little planning goes a long way — many teams reserve a range of numbers per source or per month so they can tell at a glance where a batch of records came from. It costs nothing now and saves a lot of squinting later when you have dozens of lists side by side in the table.

That is the whole job: name it, ID it, save it. The hard part is the rules around the ID, and now you know them. If you would rather skip the server setup entirely and have a secure dialer ready in under 40 seconds, take a look at our managed VICIdial plans.