Every result type, explained: what each status means

Your verification finished. Now you are staring at a spreadsheet of statuses — Safe, Catch-All, Disposable — and trying to figure out what each one means and what to do with it.

This page is the reference. Every status, the typical score, whether to send to it, and the action to take.

Quick reference table

Higher score = safer to send. Think of it as a confidence rating out of 100. Now the details.

Safe (score 98)

The green light. The mailbox exists, the domain accepts mail, and the address is ready to receive your message.

Marking an address as Safe means we confirmed all of the following:

• Syntax is valid.
• The domain exists and has MX records.
• The specific mailbox responds and accepts mail.
• It is not a disposable, role, or otherwise risky address.

Send with confidence. Our ≤3% bounce-rate guarantee applies to addresses marked Safe.

Role (score 93)

The address is valid and will receive your message, but it belongs to a team or function, not a person:

• info@company.com
• support@company.com
• sales@company.com
• admin@company.com
• billing@company.com
• hr@company.com

These are often monitored by several people, forwarded to a ticketing system, or in some cases barely checked. They are not personal inboxes.

You can send to them, but expect lower engagement and a higher spam-complaint rate. Most marketers segment role accounts away from personal addresses and adjust the messaging accordingly.

Catch-All (score 71)

The domain is configured to accept mail to any address on it, even ones that do not exist. Ask the server "does random-gibberish-12345@example.com exist?" and it says yes.

That means when we check john@example.com against a catch-all domain, the server says yes — but it would have said yes regardless. We cannot confirm whether John specifically has a real mailbox there.

Why companies enable catch-all

• To catch typos (johnn@ instead of john@).
• To make sure no message gets lost.
• Default config that was never changed.

What to do

Catch-all addresses won't hard-bounce, but they might soft-bounce, auto-reply, or vanish into a generic inbox no one watches. Test a small batch first (10–20%), measure bounces and replies, then decide whether to send to the rest.

For a deep dive on handling catch-all results, see our complete catch-all guide.

Disposable (score 30)

A temporary throwaway address that will self-destruct soon — or already has. Services like Guerrilla Mail, 10 Minute Mail, and Mailinator let anyone spin up an instant inbox that expires after minutes to hours.

People use them to dodge marketing email, grab a freebie, or sign up without committing a real address.

Delete them. The person doesn't want to hear from you (that is the entire point of using a throwaway), the address will stop working soon, and sending to expired addresses pushes your bounce rate up.

Inbox Full (score 20)

The address exists and was valid, but the mailbox is at capacity. There is no room for new messages right now.

This typically means the owner hit a storage limit, hasn't cleaned the inbox in years, or abandoned the account without deleting it. It is a temporary state — the mailbox could start accepting again if cleared. Realistically, most full mailboxes are inactive.

Move them to a "retry later" segment. Re-verify in 30–60 days if the contact is valuable. If it is still full after multiple checks, drop it.

Disabled (score 4)

The account used to exist but has been deactivated by the provider. Common reasons:

• User violated terms of service.
• Account abandoned long enough to be suspended.
• Provider shut it down for security reasons.
• Work email after the person left the company.

Disabled is different from Invalid: the mailbox existed at one point, it just is not active anymore. Functionally, the result is the same — the message will bounce. Remove it.

Invalid (score 3)

The address does not exist. It was never created, was deleted, contains a typo (gmial.com), or the domain itself does not accept mail.

Invalid addresses are list poison: they guarantee bounces, hurt your sender reputation, and can get you flagged by ISPs. Drop them.

Before deleting, scan for obvious typos you can fix if you have another way to reach the contact:

• john@gmial.com → john@gmail.com
• sarah@yhoo.com → sarah@yahoo.com
• mike@company.con → mike@company.com

Spam Trap (~3)

A honeypot designed specifically to catch spammers. It looks like a normal address, but it is a trap operated by an ISP or anti-spam organization.

Two types

• Pristine traps. Addresses that were never real mailboxes. They exist solely to catch people scraping websites or buying sketchy email lists.
• Recycled traps. Addresses that were once real but got abandoned. After sitting inactive long enough, ISPs repurpose them as traps. That contact from 2018 who left the company? Their email might be a trap now.

Why this matters

Hitting a spam trap can:

• Get your domain blacklisted.
• Destroy your sender reputation.
• Cause every email you send to land in spam folders.
• Get your ESP account suspended.

We catch known traps, but no service catches 100% of them. That is why list hygiene matters more than verification alone. If you are hitting multiple traps, audit the source of your list — buying lists, scraping data, and using years-old contacts are the usual culprits.

Unknown (score 0)

We could not determine whether the address is valid. The mail server did not respond, timed out, has unusual security configuration, or rate-limited the check.

Unknown is not the same as invalid. It means uncertain.

What to do

1. Retry later. Server issues are usually temporary.
2. Send cautiously to a small batch if the contact is valuable.
3. Skip them if you have plenty of Safe addresses.

How the score is built

Every verified address gets a confidence score from 0 to 100.

The score combines the verification result type, the domain reputation, and additional risk factors. A clean Safe email scores around 98. A Role email scores 93 (still safe, just slightly higher risk because group addresses behave differently). Catch-All sits around 71 because we cannot confirm the mailbox itself.

A note on "Risky"

You may occasionally see a status of risky in your results. It is in our type system for forward-compatibility, but it is uncommon in practice — current providers do not regularly emit it. When it does appear, treat it like catch-all: test small, measure, then decide.

Even Safe emails can still bounce

Verification confirms the mailbox exists at the moment we checked. Things can change between that moment and when you send:

• Someone deletes their account after you verified.
• A server has a temporary outage.
• Your content trips a spam filter.
• The recipient manually blocks you.
• Your sending IP has reputation issues.

To minimize bounces beyond verification, set up SPF/DKIM/DMARC properly, warm up new sending addresses gradually, keep content clean, and watch your sender reputation.

Decision framework

Next steps