Glossary
Plain-English definitions of every OmniLead term, from catch-all to suppression list.
5 min readLast updated
This page defines the terms you'll see in OmniLead and in these docs. Terms are grouped by where you meet them. Each definition links to the article that covers it in depth.
Search and data
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Lens | A mode of the product focused on one kind of search: Leads, Investors, Researchers or Grants. Switching lens changes search, filters, templates and home widgets, but not your CRM or inbox. See Switching lenses. |
| Lead | Any person or organization saved in your workspace, whichever lens it came from. A lead is tagged with its source lens. |
| Masked contact | A result whose email and phone are hidden until you reveal them. You see the name, organization and role for free. |
| Reveal | Showing a masked contact's details for 1 credit. A second reveal of the same contact is free. See Plans & credits explained. |
| Provenance | The record of where a value came from: source URL, provider and the date it was found. Every email, phone and fact has one. See Provenance explained. |
| Provider | A data source OmniLead reads from, such as SEC EDGAR, OpenAlex or NIH RePORTER. Some providers need an API key; without one they show Connect provider. See Where our data comes from. |
| Form D | A notice filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission when a company or fund raises money under certain exemptions. Funds file one when they raise from their own investors, which is how OmniLead finds active funds. |
| Crawler | OmniLead's website reader. It visits a company's public pages (home, about, team, contact, impressum and footer) to find published emails, phones and team members. It respects robots.txt. |
| Email pattern | The format a company uses for addresses, such as first.last@company.com. OmniLead learns it from real addresses published on the same domain and uses it to rank likely addresses. |
| Saved search | A search with its filters stored under a name so you can rerun it. On Growth and Agency it can send a weekly alert for new matches. See Saved searches and alerts. |
Verification
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Verification status | The result of checking an email: Valid, Risky, Catch-all, Invalid or Unknown. See Email verification statuses. |
| Confidence | A score from 0 to 100 that says how likely an address is to deliver, combining the status with the checks behind it. |
| Catch-all domain | A domain whose mail server accepts mail for every address, real or not, so no one can confirm a single address without sending to it. |
| MX record | The DNS record that says which server receives mail for a domain. A domain without one can't receive email. |
| Role address | A shared address such as info@ or sales@ rather than a person's own inbox. |
| E.164 | The international phone format OmniLead stores numbers in: a plus sign, the country code and the number, with no spaces, for example +14155550123. See Phone formats. |
CRM
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Pipeline | An ordered set of stages that leads move through, shown as a kanban board or a table. See Pipelines and stages. |
| Stage | One column in a pipeline, such as Contacted or Meeting booked. |
| Lead drawer | The panel that opens on the right when you click a lead, with contact details, provenance, timeline, notes, tasks, tags and custom fields. See Lead profiles. |
| Custom field | A field your workspace adds to every lead, such as "Deal size" or "Fund thesis". See Custom fields. |
| Bulk action | An action applied to many selected rows at once: tag, move stage, change owner, enroll in a sequence, export or delete. See Bulk actions. |
Outreach
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Mailbox | An email account you connect to send and receive through OmniLead, using SMTP to send and IMAP to read replies. See Connect a mailbox. |
| SMTP and IMAP | The standard protocols for sending (SMTP) and reading (IMAP) email. OmniLead uses them so messages go out from your own account. |
| App password | A separate password Google generates for one app, used instead of your normal password when 2-Step Verification is on. |
| Sequence | A series of email steps and wait steps sent to enrolled leads. Replies stop it automatically. See Build a sequence. |
| Enrollment | One lead's progress through one sequence. |
| Merge tag | A placeholder such as {{firstName}} replaced with each lead's data when a message is sent. A fallback after the pipe, as in {{firstName|there}}, is used when the field is empty. See Merge tags reference. |
| Mailbox rotation | Spreading a sequence's sends across several connected mailboxes so no single one sends too much. |
| Unified inbox | One inbox for replies to every sequence across every mailbox. See Unified inbox. |
Deliverability
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| SPF, DKIM and DMARC | Three DNS records that prove mail from your domain is really from you. SPF lists who may send, DKIM signs each message, and DMARC tells receivers what to do when checks fail. See SPF, DKIM and DMARC. |
| Ramp-up | Raising a new mailbox's daily sending gradually so providers learn to trust it. See Ramp-up and sending limits. |
| Daily cap | The most emails a mailbox sends in one day. |
| Sending window | The hours of the day, in a time zone you choose, when a mailbox is allowed to send. |
| Bounce | A message returned as undeliverable. A hard bounce means the address doesn't exist; a soft bounce is temporary, such as a full mailbox. |
| Auto-pause | The circuit breaker that pauses a sequence when its bounce rate reaches 5%. See Auto-pause. |
Compliance
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Suppression list | Addresses and domains OmniLead will never send to from your workspace: unsubscribes, hard bounces, opt-outs and anything you add yourself. |
| One-click unsubscribe | The List-Unsubscribe and List-Unsubscribe-Post headers (RFC 8058) that let recipients unsubscribe from their email client's own button, plus the footer link in every message. |
| Lawful basis | The legal reason you process someone's data under GDPR, usually legitimate interest for B2B outreach. Every lead stores one. |
| Legitimate Interest Assessment (LIA) | A short written test showing your interest in contacting someone is real, necessary and balanced against their rights. OmniLead includes a template in settings. |
| Opt-out portal | The public page at /privacy/opt-out where anyone can find and remove their data from OmniLead after verifying their email. |