Hunter has been around for a couple years at this point and has become a staple tool of a lot of Business and Sales folk for email lookups. At Interseller we’re frequently asked how we’re different than Hunter so being engineers we decided to document it. Interseller has a lot more features than just email lookup (email sequencing, mail merge, CRM integration, and more), but we’re just going to focus on how we’re different for email lookups and verification.
Actual bear and wolf
Email Lookup
Hunter crawls the web pulling out email addresses and then builds a pattern recognition for that domain. For example, google.com will have a pattern of {first initial}{last name}@google.com. Using this pattern Hunter will then return the filled out pattern unless they have found that specific email from crawling the web. The problem with this methodology is that everyone at Google can choose whichever email they want.
Looking up Steven Lu at Google (who shares the same name as the Co-Founder of Interseller and engineer extraordinaire) on Hunter will result in slu@google.com. Which is not a valid email despite the confidence score.
Hunter Lookup
This is the pain point for most Hunter users. This email is invalid and sending an email to it will result in a bounce negatively impacting your email reputation. Hunter does offer an email verifications service, but is an extra step in the process and uses an additional credit.
Trying this on the same person in Interseller results in the correct email address since we approach things a bit differently.
Interseller Lookup
The way that Interseller looks up emails is by verifying in real time using name patterns (prioritizing known patterns) and returning the verified email. We also handle an increasingly large amount of edge cases such as nicknames, maiden names, and domains that are different than the website that you won’t find on Hunter.
Verification
Email verification is done by connecting to the mail server and verifying that the mail server responds to the email address. This may sound simple, but there are a ton of use cases for the different types of mail servers out there and the layers on top of them. Hunter and Interseller are very similar in the way that we handle email verification with the mail server. A common situation for many mail servers is that they will accept all email addresses. When an email server accepts all email addresses, it cannot be validated. This is where Interseller goes the extra mile by using different APIs we are able to verify emails that cannot be verified by the mail server. A great example of this is the ticketing site SeatGeek. On Hunter checking the name for jack@seatgeek.com will result in a risky email address result, which is the same result you’d have if you tried fakeemail@seatgeek.com.
Verify Catch-all on Hunter
Interseller is a different story. Trying the same email on Interseller results in a verified email, and checking fakeemail@seatgeek.com shows on Interseller as an invalid email.
Verify Catch-all on Interseller
Interseller has a ton more to offer than just email lookups and verifications. If you haven’t had a chance yet,get in touch for and try out email lookups along with all the other features we offer.