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Every email address you verify through OrbiSearch receives one of four top-level statuses: Safe, Risky, Invalid, or Unknown. Each status comes with a substatus that gives you the specific reason behind the result. Together, they tell you what OrbiSearch found and what to do next.

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The four statuses

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Safe

OrbiSearch found a conclusive or high-confidence signal that this mailbox exists and is deliverable. Safe is the strongest result possible without physically sending an email to the address.
A Safe result means the mailbox exists — it does not guarantee your message will be delivered. Post-acceptance filtering, sender policy restrictions, and mailbox changes after verification can still cause a bounce. See Verification Accuracy and Deliverability for details.

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Risky

The email belongs to a catch-all domain, and OrbiSearch was unable to find a conclusive or high-confidence signal that the mailbox does or does not exist. Catch-all domains accept mail to any address, making it impossible to confirm whether a specific mailbox is real. No email verification provider can resolve all catch-all addresses. When OrbiSearch cannot determine mailbox existence with sufficient confidence, the result is marked risky rather than guessing. How you handle risky results depends on your use case and risk tolerance:
  • Cold outreach: Most users exclude risky addresses to protect their sender reputation.
  • Data enrichment or analytics: You may choose to retain them with the understanding that some may not be real mailboxes.

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Invalid

OrbiSearch found a conclusive or high-confidence signal that this mailbox does not exist. The address will bounce. Remove it from your lists.
Do not send to invalid addresses. Sending to addresses that do not exist damages your sender reputation and increases your bounce rate.

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Unknown

Verification could not be completed. This is a transient issue on the target mail server’s side — typically a temporary server outage, greylisting delay, or rate limit imposed by the recipient’s domain. It is not an OrbiSearch error. Unknown results usually resolve on retry.
Re-verify unknown addresses the next day. Most transient issues resolve within that window.

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Substatuses

Every result includes a substatus with a more specific reason. The table below lists all 15 substatuses, their parent status, and what they mean.

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How to act on each status

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How OrbiSearch compares to other providers

Different providers use different labels for similar concepts. The most important difference is how catch-all emails are handled. When a provider cannot find a conclusive or high-confidence signal for whether a mailbox exists on a catch-all domain, some mark these addresses as “undeliverable” — causing you to discard prospects that may be perfectly valid. OrbiSearch distinguishes between the two cases:
  • If OrbiSearch finds a conclusive or high-confidence signal that a mailbox does not exist, it returns Invalid.
  • If OrbiSearch cannot find a conclusive or high-confidence signal on a catch-all domain, it returns Risky — so you know exactly what was found and can make your own decision based on your use case and risk tolerance.