Be aware - Company/Service is going downhill
I have been using their service for around 8 months. So, I have quite a lot of experience with them. Initially their service was good. I was satisfied with the things they were offering and with their promises. But things ain't the same nowadays and moving downward fast. The most dangerous thig is that many of these issues seem intentional! I will try to point out some of the major issues I have noticed so far.
1. The verification quality went down by a lot. Recently I am seeing a lot higher bounces than before and they are only providing generic answers to my questions about that.
2. Their single email verification feature has been disabled for months. When try to verify an address, it allows shows the following error message (copied from there) - "The Single Search for the Verifier is disabled due to an outage. Please use the Bulk Verifier instead.". How long you need to fix an unexpected outage? 1 month, 2 months, 6 months or never? Now to me it seems like they are doing it intentionally to prevent the users from using their service and probably save some money.
3. Verification via CSV file also doesn't work many times. Many times they will just through some sort of file validation error saying the file format is incorrect or something, but the same file will work after a few times.
4. The promised to release the API support from the december of last year. But after almost 9 months, still no functional API support available.
5. Verification results also have many issues. Many good emails are lost as accept-all which they are not. Verification still cannot detect most of the temporary emails and so on.
I never like to give bad reviews and I waited 8 months because of that. I hope they will fix the issues soon and will become more serious about their service. Good luck.
ash_brandnav
Sep 5, 2024Hi k.back39,
My deepest apologies for your terrible experience with BrandNav. We take customer queries seriously and I believe we can rectify everything you have mentioned here.
At BrandNav, we have active live support that always exists to answer all your queries and assist you in every way. So far we have served over 10,000 users on BrandNav and have actively resolved over 500 requests.
Please allow me to address your concerns one by one.
1. Being in the Sales industry we understand that higher bounces are not directly co-related to inaccurate email verification.
In fact we take special care in reducing false positives and we can claim that our false positive rate is the lowest in the industry. Bounces can be due to a lot of reasons, and is often seen to increase over time if outreach campaigns are not monitored properly.
We recommend you look at the exact bounce reports from ESPs to understand what is wrong, or screenshot it and send it to our live chat support for further assistance. This may look like a “generic” answer but it’s the bounce notification that tells you the exact reason why your email got bounced.
2. BrandNav verifies over a million emails every week, out of which less than a 100 are verified through the Single email verification.
I apologise for the inconvenience any downtime on this feature may have caused you. We have a small team and with the launch of the API, our team has been occupied with stabilizing our verification process.
The Single email verification feature will be reinstated on priority if more users request it at the earliest. For now we will update the messaging and see that the feature is brought back online.
We appreciate your feedback on the notification message.
3. Over the past year, a lot of CSV-related issues have been resolved.
Due to our live support directly on BrandNav, every time any user faces any issues, our team promptly resolves it for them.
More often, we have found that users tend to upload CSVs with empty columns, empty rows, random data in a cells outside the table, and so on, which our system rejects. Once the kinks are cleaned, users are able to resume their verification request.
I would recommend you take this query to our live chat support so we can better assist you.
4. We have rolled out the API since Mid-July and have around 50+ users actively using it.
To make sure we stick to our standards of email verification, we have allowed limited access to people who have a proper use case for it.
Since APIs are more programmatically abused, we will continue to develop our anti-abuse systems over the next few months before opening the API to everyone.
If you want to access the API sooner before the public release, you can apply for it at https://app.brandnav.io/api-keys/verifier. Our team will be in touch.
5. "Accept-all" or "Catch-all" email addresses are email addresses that accept any emails. Due to this nature marking them as "valid" or "invalid" is not always possible.
Please note that "Catch-all" emails are not "invalid" emails.
Temporary emails are also a bit challenging to detect. BrandNav uses a dynamic database that grows daily, with over 1 million temporary domains already listed. However, since new domains are constantly emerging, detection is an ongoing process, but we’re continuously improving our system.
I hope I was able to address all your concerns.
If you need further assistance, please feel free to contact us via Live support, or email us at support@brandnav.io