# Cannot Identify users attached to no segment

**URL:** <https://forum.mautic.org/t/cannot-identify-users-attached-to-no-segment/12882>\
**Category:** Product Support\
**Created:** [February 18, 2020, 10:50pm UTC](https://forum.mautic.org/t/cannot-identify-users-attached-to-no-segment/12882 "2020-02-18T22:50:51Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![bulgin](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/forum.mautic.org/bulgin/32/1001_2.png) [@bulgin](https://forum.mautic.org/u/bulgin)\
**Post date:** [February 18, 2020, 10:50pm UTC](https://forum.mautic.org/t/cannot-identify-users-attached-to-no-segment/12882/1 "2020-02-18T22:50:51Z")

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**Your software**  
My Mautic version is:2.16.0  
My PHP version is: 7.2.27

**Your problem**  
My problem is: where are contacts that are not associated with any segment, stored? Or are they simply known as not associated with any segment and that’s that?

How can someone search for ONLY contacts not associated with a segment? There doesn’t seem to be a way to filter and separate out contacts not associated with segments vs. those associated with contacts. .

These errors are showing in the log:

Steps I have tried to fix the problem:

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**Author:** ![silavapi](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/forum.mautic.org/silavapi/32/7424_2.png) [@silavapi](https://forum.mautic.org/u/silavapi)\
**Post date:** [February 19, 2020, 10:27am UTC](https://forum.mautic.org/t/cannot-identify-users-attached-to-no-segment/12882/2 "2020-02-19T10:27:45Z")

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Hmm, that’s a good question!

I couldn’t see anything obvious in the search filters that are available, I’ve asked in the dev channel on Slack.

Depending on how many segments you have, it might be possible to chain negatives (e.g. !segment + !segment2 + !segment3) although that would rapidly become unmanagable.

 ![screenshot-local.mautictest-2020.02.19-10_26_41](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/uploads/mautic/original/2X/4/40a251f2dcf7f619395dd5f7248b95445e1369fb.png)

Perhaps something to add as a feature request, explaining the use case (e.g. why you would want to see all contacts who are not in any segments)?

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**Author:** ![richmarks20](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/forum.mautic.org/richmarks20/32/7266_2.png) [@richmarks20](https://forum.mautic.org/u/richmarks20)\
**Post date:** [February 9, 2023, 4:40pm UTC](https://forum.mautic.org/t/cannot-identify-users-attached-to-no-segment/12882/3 "2023-02-09T16:40:06Z")

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I’ve had the same issue. The only way I’ve found to identify these kind of contacts is using an external database query, then using Mautic’s API to batch update the contacts - I personally put them into a segment called “no segment”, but you could do whatever you want. Let me know if you want more detail.
