Are High-Security Checks Worth It?

Last Updated: April 26, 2023 by Bence Jendruszak
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A reverse email lookup tool, which can be a dedicated software system or just a search engine feature, let you enter an email address and get the owner’s personal data. This usually includes a first and last name as well as an address and phone number.
Such a tool may also obtain links to their social media accounts and additional technical information about the email address itself.
Reverse email lookup tools enable a form of data enrichment where you attain extra information based on a limited number of data points. It may be combined with other data enrichment solutions, such as a reverse phone lookup or BIN lookup, to complete a picture about a certain website visitor.
SEON’s email search tool lets you gain personal information about someone using their email address. By searching public databases and social networks for links to that email address, the tool can reveal the email owner’s first name, last name, social media accounts, and much more.
Both companies and individuals rely on email search tools. They tend to use these solutions for three key reasons:
The above professionals are the most likely to employ these tools – but they can be equally useful to other fields as well as to private individuals, on occasion.
Of course, not all these solutions are created equal. Let’s see what you should consider before signing up.
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Most of the time, you can simply enter the email address into the search bar and press Enter. The results will appear directly on the website. Some providers also deliver PDF reports.
For more advanced lookups, you can use API calls or web browser extensions. You can also upload lists of email addresses via CSV file or Excel spreadsheet.
For this comparison article, we’ve tried to eliminate all the tools that were obviously out of scope based on the five points above and the limits mentioned below.
The limitations are largely down to the pricing options: Many email lookup tools are used by companies that draw you in with free searches, which culminate in you finding out that only the searches are free. The search results themselves are not. In fact, you may even find a free service, only to find it sends you towards a paid one.
Something else to consider, especially for marketers, is that verifying webmail addresses can be difficult or unavailable. For instance, hunter.io lets you clearly know that it only works with professional domains.
Then there are issues with speed. If you run, say, an ecommerce shop that needs to verify the email addresses a great deal of users in real-time, your only option is to plug in an email analysis tool into your system. The results with risk analysis tools are near-instant. With other services, you have to enter addresses one at a time and wait upward of five minutes to get the results.
Also, do not mistake reverse email search tools with an email search or email finder. While an email address search tool is designed to find an email address based on a name, a reverse email lookup tool does the opposite. As such, the email search market is made of many different solutions, and this can make it complicated to navigate.
Finally, there’s the issue of data quality. Many tools need to go through very old databases to acquire their personal information, which defeats the purpose when you’re after fresh and up-to-date details.
In fact, with some background checkers, you can often get better results simply by typing the email address into a search engine yourself.
You can read more about how to find information manually on our guide on OSINT techniques.
Below, we’ve identified and are reviewing six email lookup solutions you can try today, including the pros and cons of each one as well as where they excel.
Disclaimer: Everything in this article was gleaned from research, including user reviews. We did not have time to manually test all the tools. This guide was last updated in Q3 2022. Please contact us to request any changes or corrections.
Let’s start with a solution that works great for fraud prevention, risk management and general business protection. SEON gives you extra data to make intelligent decisions about whether you should accept a user action or not.
That action can be a transaction or signup. Checking whether the user appears to exist or not is particularly useful as a pre-KYC check, so you can avoid paying for the verification of junk users. For a transaction, you’re also protecting yourself from chargebacks.
As for the kind of info you get, SEON lets you know everything you need about the email address domain. Its key feature, however, is the reverse social media lookup, which finds whether the address has been used on 50+ social sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Booking.com, Airbnb, and more, and gleans information from there.
With this reverse email lookup solution, the results are instant, you can perform the checks manually, via API or with a Google Chrome extension, and you even get a risk score to help your decision-making.
Pricing: $299/month minimum charge. There is also a free version, no card required.
Spokeo, founded in 2006, offers its customers a comprehensive tool for doing background research on both people and businesses. The California-based company started as a social media aggregator, and takes that experience to its current product offering, which scans over 120 social sites for real-time user data, including dating sites, blog posts, and product reviews. In total, the data amounts to over 12 billion records to cross-reference.
Though there is no automation provided by the service, manual lookups and fraud investigations can be greatly aided by the reverse email lookup functionality to uncover signs of trustworthiness, or lack thereof.
Snov.io – or Snovio – has all the features you might need for validating email addresses and it’s blazing fast, delivering results in under one minute. Like many other tools, it uses an SMTP-MX check to verify the deliverability of the address.
You can upload bulk addresses and export the results in CSV, XLSX, or Google Sheet formats. Another strong point is that this tool’s customer service gets loads of praise from users. Note that Snov.io also has an email finder/email search function, which can be handy for marketers.
The free version of BeenVerified will give you email verification and a few more data points: In some cases, the person’s name from LinkedIn, and a check for two linked social media accounts (Twitter and LinkedIn).
It is for US use only and will trawl through legal documents to locate info on criminal records and bankruptcy reports. Each search takes 2–10 minutes.
Be aware that although BeenVerified says checking is free, getting all the results is not. It costs $26.89 a month for up to 100 reports.
Offering both a free and paid product model, with the paid version offering unlimited lookups. The software takes name, phone, or address data and conducts a thorough background search of available US public records, including criminal records, arrest records, previous aliases, and court appearances. Notably, this service currently only scrutinizes the United States and outlying territories.
Executing a search takes several minutes as data is compiled. The resulting profile focuses on criminal history, making CheckPeople a valuable tool for small businesses in particular as they onboard new employees and partners. These results require a submitted email address to receive if using the free model.
Though most options on this list focus on background checks, Adapt.io’s reverse email lookups are designed for B2B marketing and sales.
After entering a business email address, the resulting data helps build pipeline by segmenting customer bases, finding accurate contact information, generating customer profiles that can be valuable during sales pitches, and maintaining data hygiene. Many of these processes can be automated. The software can also be tuned to target prospects that match your ICP, and can build curated email lists of those prospects.
The Adapt.io platform exists as standalone software that is integrated easily into your datastreams via APIs.
The Anymail Finder product delivers a service that helps businesses maintain their marketing and sales email hygiene, maintaining low bounce rates and verifying corporate email addresses. Entering a business or corporate email address checks that address for signs of spam, invalid business domains, and disposable email addresses to make sure your demand-generating email lists are efficient, while also keeping your sender reputation high.
The service is integrated into your business workflows via an API, and you are not charged for email addresses that get returned with partial or no validation. The product offers functions to assess bulk lists of email addresses for validity, and also create targeted lists from those bulk lists. This can also be done from the included Google Chrome extension.
InfoTracer bundles all its services together with its unlimited plans, which means you’ll get reverse email search along with people lookup, background lookup, and court lookups.
Like BeenVerified, they will attract you with a “free” search, but you actually need to pay for the results. Like their closest competitor, they’re also very much a US-centric background check company.
The tool looks at public records, including criminal records, court records, along with a few social checks and vital records (birth, death, marriage or divorce). You can also get a professional background check by looking at publicly listed licenses, such as a lawyer or electrician license.
t publicly listed licenses, such as a lawyer or electrician license.
A simple online tool, Spytox also lets you look up by name or phone number. The advantage is that it’s completely free and fairly fast, so it is ideal for ad-hoc searches.
Unfortunately, the tool didn’t seem to work 100% of the time during our testing, and the results were mixed in quality, rather than “explosive”, as the website promises.
It could be a nice help for a manual review, but we wouldn’t rely completely on Spytox for risk management or marketing.
RecordsFinder is so similar to BeenVerified and InfoTracer, one has to wonder if they’re not all run by the same people. In fact, you could pretty much copy and paste what we wrote about their two competitors and apply it here: Free check but expensive subscription to get results, US-centric, and good for background checks using public documents.
But we do have an additional word of warning: Reviews for RecordsFinder seem to be on the negative side. A Reddit user mentions having their Chrome browser hijacked by RecordsFinder ads, probably after they clicked that suspicious button.
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SEON | Snov.io | BeenVerified | InfoTracer | Spytox | RecordsFinder | Spokeo | CheckPeople | Adapt.io | Anymail Finder | |
Name and address | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Social media check | 50+ | No | 3–5 | 3–5 | No | 3–5 | 120+ | No | No | No |
Speed | Real-time | 2–5 minutes | 10 minutes per check | 10 minutes per check | 5 seconds | 10 minutes per check | 15 seconds | 2-5 minutes | N/A | N/A |
US public records | No | No | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Some | No |
Email address verification | Yes | Yes | No | No | No | No | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
Extra features? | Risk scoring | Prospect quality campaign building | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | Sales & marketing segmentation, list-building | Email verification |
Pricing | $299/month minimum charge | $30/month for 1,000 credits | $22.86/ month for unlimited checks | Pay per record, from $1.50 for a people search to $25 for a background business report. | free | $12.95 per search | $19.95/month | $29.17/month | starts at $49/month | starts at $14/50 lookups |
Free trial? | Included | No | No | No | N/A | No | No | Limited free searched | contact sales team | Yes |
One advantage of using an email address to research user information is that this leads to email profiling that can reveal a vast amount of information associated with that addresses. This is why using these tools is also referred to as doing an “email background check”. They are also a lot more specific than, say, finding information about a device or IP address.
The first question a reverse email search can answer is whether the email address is real or not. This is verified using an SMTP check. In short, the tool sends a request to the email address domain (@gmail.com or @yahoo.co.uk, for instance) and checks if the address exists.
Among the high-quality email domains on the market are those that are less trustworthy. It all has to do with how hard it is to open an account using them. For instance, while gmail.com sounds reputable, it is free and can therefore be concerningly easy for suspicious individuals to create their own gmail accounts.
Nevertheless, there are other providers that have more stringent verification processes, such as SMS verification, which makes them more secure. Plus, quality verifications can be enhanced through domain checking websites as well as by ascertaining the email address’s age. While there are exceptions to this rule, such as when established email addresses have been involved in a data breach (more on this a little later), the newer addresses tend to be less trustworthy than their more mature counterparts.
One of the most powerful ways to check the validity of an email address these days is to see if it has been used to sign up to any social media platforms. Also known as social media profiling, this process will check if the address is used by someone on LinkedIn, Instagram or Facebook, among others.
This is because a good social media lookup tool will also provide information about the person’s name, location, workplace and bio – all information that would take a tremendous amount of time to collect manually, especially if you need to do this for a long list of people.
A good tool can compare the address to those found on data breaches. Finding an address in one of those breaches helps us get an idea of how old the email address is, and how regularly it was used, but it may hint at illicit use if a fraudster took control of it.
Another way to check if fraudsters have already used that email address is to look for it on public spam blacklists. If someone’s registering with a known spammer address, you might want to block them or verify their other details manually, as the account holder might not have control over the mailbox anymore (or worse, it could be a malicious address).
Finally, an interesting data point that can be hard to measure: how likely is it that the email address was created by a real user vs a bot or fraudster, both of whom need to work fast. This has to do with the quality of the email name itself.
Using string analysis, a good email profiling tool should be able to see if the email address looks genuine, or if it’s just been generated automatically. For instance, using a large amount of numbers or special characters can be suspicious. Same if the name in the handle and account are different.
Finding information about someone based on their email address has plenty of use cases. It’s great for marketers, human resources, curious individuals, and risk managers.
However, not all tools are created equal. And because there are so many different scenarios for using one of the tools, it’s hard to recommend a clear winner. However, the below might help guide your decision.
Just remember to do your due diligence before you sign up for any of these services. They should offer a free trial so you can test that they’re right for you.
Hopefully, this article has served as a good filter to point you in the right direction. As we’ve seen, email lookup is a powerful tool for various uses, and finding the one that works best for your needs can deliver convenience and added value.
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No, we are completely transparent with our pricing structure, which you can find on our website (volume discounts are available as well as a non-committal free trial).
Most email lookup tools enrich data from open-source databases (OSINT). SEON aggregates device, IP and social media information.
It depends on the tool or service. For SEON, all data sourced is GDPR-compliant, ensuring legality and compliance with the necessary regulators for the EU.
No, all of the above checks have no impact on the user. Keep in mind that, depending on their privacy settings, you can visit the profiles directly, which for certain platforms like LinkedIn can notify the user in question.
It’s worth noting that the domain can also reveal more about the data provided. Disposable domains are at high risk as these are just throwaway email addresses. Meanwhile, custom domains may need further inspection, as fraudsters might use this method to get whitelisted.
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Bence Jendruszák is the Chief Operating Officer and co-founder of SEON. Thanks to his leadership, the company received the biggest Series A in Hungarian history in 2021. Bence is passionate about cybersecurity and its overlap with business success. You can find him leading webinars with industry leaders on topics such as iGaming fraud, identity proofing or machine learning (when he’s not brewing questionable coffee for his colleagues).
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