What is a verification status in Hunter?
At Hunter, we verify email addresses to help you reach the right people and reduce the risk of bounces.
Most email addresses found through Domain Search are already verified, and every email returned by Email Finder is verified before being provided to you.
Each email comes with a verification status to help you understand whether it's safe to use:
for Valid and Invalid emails, we display the verification status directly.
for Accept-all and Unknown emails, we also include a confidence score to help you better assess their deliverability.
An email address can have different email verification statuses which we can group into:
Valid: email addresses that can receive emails and can be used safely.
Accept all: email addresses that have email servers that accept any type of email sent to them. Using this type may lead to bounces. Click here for more information about accept all emails.
Invalid: email addresses that can't receive emails, are inactive and shouldn't be used.
Disposable: email addresses which are temporary emails that shouldn't be used for cold outreach.
What do the possible verification statuses mean?
Valid
Valid means that this email address is active and can receive emails; you can safely use this email address.
Accept All
When an email address has an accept-all status (sometimes called catch-all), it means that the domain associated with the email has a policy to report any email on the domain as valid. As a result, tools like Hunter and most verification tools can't verify if the email is currently deliverable. More information on accept-all emails can be found here.
Invalid
When an email address has a status of Invalid, it means it has failed the verification checks, and it shouldn't be used since it doesn't exist or can't receive emails.
Disposable
A disposable email address is a temporary email that self-destructs after a certain timeframe.
Unknown
When an email address has a status Unknown, or Blocked it means that Hunter could not determine the validity of the email.
This usually happens when the domain linked to the email is grey-listing or blocking our verification process, preventing Hunter from validating the email address.
If a server is just slow to respond rather than actively blocking us, Hunter keeps checking in the background instead of returning Unknown right away — you can come back later to see the finished result.
To learn more, visit our help article on Why some email addresses can't be verified.
What status is applied to emails that haven't been verified yet?
All the emails found in Hunter without a validity status are marked as unknown (they can be recognized thanks to the grey shield icon).
They can be verified by clicking the "Verify" button:
ℹ️ 0.5 credits are used after clicking the Verify button only if the email can be verified. No credits will be used in case the status is "unknown".