Export the members of a chat and the result contains two kinds of rows: those with a username and those without. The second kind looks complete — a name, an identifier — but cannot be written to.
Why
A username is a public address the person sets themselves, and plenty of people never bother: it is not needed to talk to friends. Every account has an internal identifier, but no stranger can open a conversation with a user from that side. This is a defence against mass messaging, not a gap in the tool.
How many
The share depends on the audience and cannot be predicted in advance. In professional communities almost everyone has one — it is a work contact. In general and neighbourhood chats the share of empty entries is noticeably higher.
The only honest way to know is to collect a sample and look. Any general percentage here would be invented.
What to do
- Filter at collection. There is no reason to carry rows you cannot use — see cleaning a database.
- Plan against the usable part. "We collected ten thousand" and "we can message ten thousand" are different numbers, and only the second one is a plan.
- Do not confuse it with privacy settings. A username that exists while messages still do not arrive is a separate problem — what parsing can and cannot do.
Is there a workaround
Not one that respects the platform's rules and leaves the account alive. Services promising to message "by ID" either do not, or do it in a way that ends in restrictions — see why Telegram restricts accounts.
What works instead
If someone cannot be reached privately, they can be reached where they already are: in the same chat, under the same post. Slower, but it does not depend on their privacy settings — comment marketing.
How Neurogram does this
Everything above is manual work that runs into the number of hours in a day. Neurogram does it on your own accounts and without you: it collects channels and audiences, writes comments and replies with a language model, and keeps limits and quiet hours so the accounts survive. See pricing or look at your case.