Zerobounce Email Validation: The Definitive Review

Oct 31, 2023
7

Zerobounce is a tool for checking email addresses and keeping your email lists clean. People choose Zerobounce because of its accuracy and ease of use.

zerobounce email validation - cover

Well, they might be right about the accuracy, but there are also other things that senders should pay attention to, like speed, integration, and safety. Why? Because for some people, it might be better. Keep reading to get the key features, pros, and cons, and find out if this is a good tool for email verification.

What is Zerobounce email validation? 

Zerobounce is an email verification service. They focus on checking if the email addresses on your list are correct and deliverable. This means that every invalid and outdated address is removed from a list.

It was established in 2015 and is trusted by many companies of all sizes.
 

Zerobounce website

Let’s see what users like about Zerobounce.

Zerobounce key features

Here are the most important features in Zerobounce.

Email validation 

It’s the main feature of Zerobounce. They claim that their accuracy rate is 99%. According to third-party tools, the accuracy is about 98%, which is pretty close.  

Zerobounce covers: 

  • Gmail accounts
  • Yahoo accounts
  • Catch-all addresses (although, the accuracy for them is quite low, only 58%)
  • Disposable email verification 
  • Role-based account detection
  • Greylisted email addresses
  • Domain and MX validation
  • SMTP verification
  • AOL Account verification 
  • Removing duplicate emails 
  • Habitual complainer detection 
  • Honeypots/Spam traps 

It’s worth mentioning that Zerobounce has an email scoring system. Using artificial intelligence, it assesses how subscribers will react to your emails.

However, the tool does not provide specific details on its accuracy rate for detecting spam traps.

Also, there is no explicit mention of how well it handles common email addresses from providers other than Gmail and Yahoo (for those two, the accuracy is 100%).

The speed 

If you have a large email database, the speed of your email verification service is crucial. For one million emails, it can take days or hours to have a clean, verified list.

If your email validation process is slow, you might end up sending emails to invalid or other risky email addresses. 

And unfortunately, it might not have a desirable outcome: email bounces, spam complaints, and even getting your emails marked as spam. That’s why you need to pay attention to this aspect as well. 

Zerobounce takes 110 minutes to validate 10,000 emails (checked by the third-party tool – CleaningListAdvice). Which makes it pretty slow compared to other alternatives. 

The integrations 

Integrations help the tool work together with other programs and services you use. They get you connected directly to your email campaigns and other email deliverability tools. 

You can check and clean your email lists right where you work without having to move your contacts around between different programs. It makes the whole process quicker and more convenient.

That’s why it’s always worth checking out the list of integrations when researching.  

ZeroBounce includes 45+ integrations, for example, with MailChimp and Constant Contact. 

In other words, there are plenty of integrations that an email marketing specialist will find useful.

Security 

Zerobounce secures data by encrypting the files they run through their email verification tool. 

The service complies with both the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield Framework and the Swiss-U.S. Privacy Shield Framework. They’re also GDPR, SOC2, and HIPAA compliant.

Customer reviews of Zerobounce

Before committing financially, always check the reviews. And if you don’t have the time, we’ve done that for you. We’ve analyzed hundreds of Zerobounce to point out some of the common pros and cons that real users mention.

Praises:

Valid thought leadership in the marketing space. A good tool, with good assets and good customer service – never seen such quick and efficient feedback.

After uploading the list of emails, we got back fast results. The control pane was good as well as the ability to download results.

The price is good for the service, you will gain time using Zerobounce to clean up your email list. The service is really quick, and the customer support is reactive and nice.

Complaints:

🛑 We had issues with our domain being restricted by other mail providers because of the number of mistyped or discontinued e-mail addresses on our mail lists.

🛑 The initial setup is quite difficult to understand.

🛑 My problem was an old email database. I wanted to be sure which emails were current and of those, which ones were likely to give a high bounce rate or cause complaints.

🛑 We have tried several spam email filter programs with disappointing results because, despite the configuration established, some spam emails arrived in the main tray.

🛑 Had to break up my 250K into smaller files to update. Too much trouble. Then after getting only approved emails and uploading them into Constant Contact we were declined due to too many bad emails.

source: Capterra

The better alternative for Zerobounce email validation

Zerobounce is a solid email verification service. There are many good reviews, strong security measures, and it covers quite a few email types in terms of validations, there are better players. 

One of them is Bouncer, an email validation platform built for users who put value on speed, accuracy and great value.
 

Zerobounce email validation vs Bouncer

 

Bouncer is a great alternative to Zerobounce in terms of email validation. 

It is known for being very accurate – email addresses are not wrongly labeled as invalid. 

Bouncer stands out in verifying email addresses of various providers, like deep catchall verification for Google Workspace and Office365, resulting in a low rate of unknown results (0.3% – 3%).
 

Bouncer website

 
To give a clear picture, we’ll cover all the aspects discussed in the Zerobounce case, which are: 

Email validation

You can validate email addresses so they are correct and safe to use in your email campaigns. It is known for its high precision, with an accuracy rate of around 99.5%.

Here are the email validation capabilities you might find useful:

  • Disposable checker detects temporary email contacts by checking them against an extensive database.
  • Catch-all feature finds out if an email address belongs to a domain that accepts all emails sent to it, regardless of the local part of the address.
  • Global adaptability allows for the validation of email addresses from anywhere in the world.
  • Customizable download options make it possible to fully tailor and filter the results once verification is complete.
  • Role email detection finds email addresses that are role-based and not assigned to a specific individual, like info@examplecom or [email protected].
  • Syntax validation automatically identifies any email addresses with syntax errors, saving you manual work.
  • Domain validation marks all emails that contain inactive or invalid domains.
  • MX record detection confirms the existence of MX records for each domain, keeping only genuine records.
  • Spam trap detection helps identify and remove spam traps from your email list.

Bouncer will help you find valid contacts in a snap. 

The speed

Bouncer is one of the fastest email validation tools on the market. As mentioned above, it can validate around 20,000 emails in an hour. It’s not just fast, it’s twice as fast as Zerobounce.

Seamless integrations

Bouncer offers numerous integrations, like MailChimp, AWeber, Constant Contact, Convertkit, Getresponse, Moosend and others. And if you want to connect with other tools that are not on the main list, you can do it via API. 

Application programming interface, in short API, lets one program send a request to another program, get a response back, and do something useful with it.

Not sure how to use it? 

Bouncer provides extensive documentation to help users get the most out of their API, and their dedicated support team is available to assist with any questions or issues.

On top of that, API supports both real-time and batch processing. This makes it highly adaptable to different use cases. It is great for verifying new signups or cleaning email lists.

Read more >> 8 best email validation APIs to try in 2023

Security

The measures are fortress-like! Bouncer is GDPR and SOC2-compliant, HIPAA-certified, and also uses encryption to keep your data safe. 

Customer reviews of Bouncer 

The customer support team has been responsive and helpful. I highly recommend Bouncer for reliable and efficient email verification.

Really big thank you to you guys. Easy to use, perfect tool for verification for any kind of email marketing campaign.

Bouncer is easy to use and friendly for first-time users. For me being a first-time user ever, I am so happy Bouncer makes my email lead list more effective and removes those that are nonexistent.

Bouncer is very simple to use, and everything is clear and self-explanatory. Also fast, and the employees are very eager to help and improve your user experience.

Source: Capterra

📰 Check out the ultimate ranking of the best email verification tools.
 

Bouncer CTA

Validate email addresses with the right tool

Now, when you have everything analyzed, it’s your call to choose the right one. If you still have some doubts, Bouncer is our pick – it’s faster, much easier to use, and the opinions show that the customer service is super helpful.

Zerobounce is a good tool, but you deserve better!

Keep a good sender reputation with Bouncer. Sign up to verify 100 email addresses for free. 

 

Line and dots