Why we publish this
Vendor pages cherry-pick easy domains and hide the inboxes that actually bounce. We run every tool against the same 16 free-email addresses - the ones that show up in real lead lists and where false "risky" or "unknown" flags appear. If a verifier cannot finish that list, the coverage score drops. No private datasets, no negotiated enterprise rates, no annual discounts.
The three scores
1. Provider coverage
We built the test list to mirror real-world inbox distribution. Share figures come from SellCell's breakdown of the most popular email providers by number of users - Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, iCloud, AOL, and others weighted by how many people actually use them.
Every verifier runs against the same 16-address list: one valid and one invalid mailbox per provider.
| Provider | Valid | Invalid |
|---|---|---|
| Gmail | [email protected] | [email protected] |
| iCloud | [email protected] | [email protected] |
| Outlook | [email protected] | [email protected] |
| Proton | [email protected] | [email protected] |
| GMX | [email protected] | [email protected] |
| Yahoo | [email protected] | [email protected] |
| AOL | [email protected] | [email protected] |
| Zoho | [email protected] | [email protected] |
A verifier only gets full marks if it returns a definitive result for every address above - not just easy corporate domains. Reported coverage is the percentage of our list each tool could actually verify. When a tool skips a provider entirely, we subtract that provider's share from the score (for example 100% - 6.4% Yahoo - 0.7% AOL = 92.9%, or 100% - 0.4% Zoho - 0.7% AOL = 98.9%).
2. Price (100K verifications / month)
Taken directly from each vendor's public pricing page at the time of testing. We quote the monthly cost for 100,000 verifications, or 100K credits where the product is credit-based. No annual discounts, no negotiated enterprise rates - just what a new customer would pay on the website.
3. Speed
Measured end-to-end on the full test list - from upload to downloadable results. Where a tool also offers single-email API checks, we note that separately, but the headline number is always total list time. That is what matters when you are cleaning a CSV before a campaign.
What we do not score
Finder tools, sequence builders, CRM sync, and abuse scoring are useful. They are not email verification. We mention them in "who should pick this" write-ups so you can decide if you want a suite or a specialist. They never inflate a coverage or speed number.
We also do not score support tickets, SLA uptime, or SOC 2 paperwork. Those matter for procurement. They are not what this test measures.
How to read a comparison page
Each vs-page reports the three scores, then spends the rest of the article on that competitor: what it is actually good at, who should keep it, and how public pricing compares at 100K/month. The methodology lives here so those pages can stay specific instead of repeating this table eight times.
Compare the results yourself
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