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Temporary email domains. Duplicate email addresses. Bot generated accounts. These common and unsophisticated cyber attacks can ruin your email deliverability, allow users to get around paywalls, and ultimately prevent your company from understanding its customers base.
It’s a simple problem - luckily, there are lightweight, inexpensive solutions. Today, we discuss the four best software solutions for verifying email addresses. By the end of this article, you’ll have a better understanding of 1) what are fake email addresses, 2) why they're an issue, and 3) how you can combat it!
Wow, look at you - you aren’t skipping to the the sparknotes on the different solutions. For that, we say THANK YOU. You can’t stop a problem you don’t know you have… and you don’t know what you don’t know.
Fake emails come in all shapes and sizes. The only thing scarier than a fake email address is the false sense of confidence most software companies have. The three most common types of fake emails:
Without further ado, our four softwares:
Pros:
Cons:
Free option: 100 free email validations upon sign-up
Summary:
ZeroBounce is a great option for marketing teams - it will help ensure your marketing emails reach their desired inboxes. However, it’s expensive, and only the right solution to one of many impacts to your business per our above list. If you’re in need of cybersecurity software, it likely isn’t suitable.
Pros:
Cons:
Free option: 100% free plan with rate limit
Summary:
Verisoul’s Email Checkpoint is the lightest, cheapest, and most accurate solution for IT professionals when it comes to checking email domains. It’s backed by reputable VC funds and has a strong founding team, but is smaller than ZeroBounce. The full Verisoul platform offers much more functionality than Email Checkpoint, is also more expensive.
Pros:
Cons:
Free option: Only 3 API calls per day, which is essentially unusable
Summary:
VerifyMail is a lightweight solution. They’ve built a nice list of disposable domains, albeit in a manual fashion. The biggest knock on VerifyMail is their reliability / trust; there’s almost no online presence, and it’s not 100% clear who is behind the company. The dashboard is essentially non-existent, as the screenshot above highlights (only shows API usage over time).
Pros:
Cons:
Free option: 10 free email checks w/o credit card, 100 free email checks w/ credit card
Summary:
MailCheck does a nice job of offering an affordable disposable domain checker, and is a quality point solution for domains specifically. The dashboard feels a bit more professional than VerifyMail, though it’s still unclear how reliable this product is. That said, their website does a nice job of answering all FAQs on what the problem is and how they address it.
Like most authors, I’m inclined to say “it depends.” However, unlike other articles, I’m willing to draw a line in the sand.
If you’re searching for email deliverability tools, it’s clear that ZeroBounce is your best option. They offer a broad feature set in addition to simple email verification, and their tests on bounce rates are much more comprehensive than other users.
If you have an IT angle, Verisoul’s Email Checkpoint is who we’d recommend. It’s more robust as the other offerings, has unique features like AI email similarity scoring and detection of work vs. personal emails, and is the cheapest among all four offerings. In addition, you can go beyond basic email verification checks and get into network, device, and user behavior risk when you use the full platform.
