What Is a Mailable Contact?

A mailable contact is a person whose email address you can send to without expecting a bounce. This page defines the term, shows how it is decided, and gives the filter that returns only these people.

Key takeaways

• Having an email address on file does not make a contact mailable. The address needs a good status.
• LeadOcean treats verified, catch_all_valid and catch_all as mailable. It has 13 email statuses in all.
• On 2026-10-01, VPs of Sales in Canada with any email on file: 14,614. Mailable: 5,066.
• LeadOcean does not refund bounced emails. Read email_status before you send.

What it is

A mailable contact is a person whose best email address has a status that says it is worth sending to, so the message has a real chance of reaching an inbox.

The word is about the address, not the person. The same person can be mailable today and not mailable next quarter, if they change jobs or their company drops a mailbox.

Mailable is also not the same as permitted. It says nothing about whether you may email someone. That is a legal and consent question, covered below.

How it works

Every email address carries a deliverability status. LeadOcean stores it on the record as email_status.

1. Find the address. A record has an email or it does not. No email means no contact, whatever else you know about the person.
2. Read the status. The address has one of 13 statuses: verified, catch_all_valid, catch_all, risky, unknown, untested, invalid, role, disposable, spam_trap, abuse, derived or none.
3. Keep the good statuses. verified, catch_all_valid and catch_all count as mailable. Everything else is held back.
4. Send, then watch. Even a mailable address can bounce. Track bounces and drop those addresses.

catch_all deserves a note. Some domains accept mail for any address, so the server cannot confirm that one mailbox exists. Those contacts are mailable, but less certain than verified ones. If you want the strictest list, filter on verified alone.

A worked example

Say you sell to sales leaders at a fictional company, Acme, and want VPs of Sales in Canada. You size the audience twice, on 2026-10-01.

About two thirds of the people with an email on file are not in the mailable set. A list built on the first number would bounce far more than a list built on the second.

Both counts are free. The first passes hasEmail, which replaces the default status filter, so it is not a mailable count.

Mailable contact vs contact with an email

People mix these up because most tools show one "emails found" number.

Mailable is also different from reachable. A reachable contact holds an email or a phone number. A mailable contact specifically has a sendable email.

When it matters

Cold email

Bounces hurt your sending domain. A list full of invalid and risky addresses pushes your bounce rate up, and mailbox providers notice. Send only to mailable contacts and keep the rest out of the sequence.

Sizing a market

Use the mailable count to plan, not the raw email count. If a campaign needs 5,000 sendable addresses, a segment with 14,000 emails on file may still fall short. Count before you commit.

Paying for data

Filter by status before you pull rows, so the records you spend go to sendable addresses. Free gives you 1,000 records, one-off, no card. Pro is $499 a month, flat.

Staying inside the rules

A mailable address is not permission to email. In the US, the FTC says CAN-SPAM "makes no exception for business-to-business email", and requires an opt-out you honor within 10 business days (FTC, September 2026). Other countries have different rules. This is not legal advice. Ask a lawyer about your market.

How LeadOcean handles it

LeadOcean searches with the status filter emailStatus. The MCP tool count_leads applies the mailable default for you and spends no records. Passing emailStatus, hasEmail or reachable replaces that default.

Over the REST API, send count=true as a query parameter with limit 1 in the body to size an audience for free. The filters go in the JSON body. meta.total is capped at 100,000. Pass emailStatus explicitly so the count states which statuses it covers.

curl -X POST "https://api.leadocean.io/v1/people/search?count=true" \
  -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "jobLevel": ["VP"],
    "jobFunction": ["Sales & Business Development"],
    "country": ["CA"],
    "emailStatus": ["verified", "catch_all_valid", "catch_all"],
    "limit": 1
  }'

The response comes back with an empty data array and meta.countOnly set to true. Drop count=true and raise limit to pull rows. Each person returned counts one record.

To get the addresses, request them with reveal_email on POST /v1/people/enrich, or export the segment with POST /v1/exports. In the app at app.leadocean.io, the Exports page has a filter builder, a column picker, the record price before you start, and a CSV download. The CSV carries email_1_address and email_1_status, so you can re-check the status in your own sheet.

The dataset is refreshed monthly, and each record carries its own fetched_at date. See how B2B data is collected for where the records come from, and the Contact Finder skill to run this from Claude. Prices are on /pricing, and the contact page reaches the team. More explainers are in the blog.

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