What Are the Primary Sources Used by Email Finder Services?
The sources used by email finderⓘ services differ depending on the type of email finderⓘ. Let’s look at some common email-finding methods and how ZeroBounce’s Email Finderⓘ differs.
Web scrapers
Many email finders are little more than web scrapers that scour the HTML of publicly available web pages and pull found email addresses. While scraping is technically allowed, many sites have privacy policies prohibiting emailing users who did not opt into your messaging.
Database searches
Some email finders scour publicly available email databases to identify email addresses in use. This method is not unlike using a phonebook to look up a telephone number, which can work if the email address in question is listed.
Both web scraping and database searching can potentially pull data from the following sources:
- Websites
- Social media platforms
- Company directories
- Public Records
- Shared email lists
The problem with these methods is that they rely entirely on source accuracy. In addition, emails decay rapidly (as much as 23% annually), quickly making these already-limited sources outdated and unreliable.
Pattern recognition
Other email finders apply a guesswork system to determine if an email address is in use. They attempt this by generating a list of potential email address patterns used by a company domain.
The email finderⓘ tests every pattern using a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) check. Every email server has an SMTP protocol that allows it to send and receive email communications. When you email a server, it checks for the address you provided and accepts or rejects the message based on the result.
In other words, it can receive the email if the address exists. If the address is invalid, the email finderⓘ discards the pattern and moves on to the next test.
How ZeroBounce Email Finder finds emails
First, ZeroBounce never scrapes the internet for email addresses. Privacy and security are our top priorities, and we work hard to ensure our platform complies with policies and regulations worldwide.
While we cannot give away the complete secrets of how Email Finderⓘ works, it does contain a domain pattern-guessing component. Our tool uses our internal proprietary technologies to discover and test probable email address patterns used by the provided company domain.
What makes Email Finderⓘ different from other tools is that we can leverage our 99.6% accurate email verification technology to test possible email addresses further. To emphasize our privacy compliance, these tests occur in real time and never utilize existing or stored customer data from email validationⓘ.
The verification process takes our sophisticated domain guesswork further by identifying and ruling out problematic email address types, such as role-based catch-alls and toxic domains.
All processes together allow us to search for and provide trustworthy, valid business email addresses that you can safely add to your email list.
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