# Unconfirmed mailboxes are now risky, and outages are free

An address whose mailbox the handshake could not confirm answers risky with the new reason unverified instead of deliverable, and an answer lost to a handshake-partner outage costs nothing.

Date: 2026-09-03

- A mailbox the SMTP handshake could not confirm (greylisting, a timeout, an unreachable server) now answers `risky` with `reason: "unverified"`. It used to read as deliverable with `smtp_checked: false`, which hid the doubt behind the headline verdict. `smtp_reason` still names the cause and `mailbox_confidence` still estimates the odds; the risk weights are unchanged.
- An answer Spaw could not obtain because its handshake partner was unavailable (`smtp_reason: "provider_unavailable"`) is free, never cached, and probed again on the next lookup. Other unverified answers cost 1 credit like any risky verdict, and repeats stay free for 7 days.
- The test address `unverified@spaw.test` now answers `risky` / `unverified`.
- List monitors no longer count an unverified answer as decay, so a partner outage cannot trigger a false alert or erase a confirmed baseline.
- The reason reference gained a page for `unverified`, and the field tables, guides and test-address table were updated to match.

Reference: https://spaw.co/changelog/2026-09-03-unverified-verdict