Background

I'm Ayoub Lebda - founder of BOUNCEZERO LTD (UK-registered, company no. 17153835, with engineering operated from Casablanca, Morocco). I started building production email systems in 2019 and haven't stopped since. I trained at 1337 Benguerir (the Moroccan campus of the École 42 network), worked solo as a freelancer through the early 2020s, then went full-time on email infrastructure after years of running high-volume MTA and deliverability stacks and realizing the quality bottleneck was always upstream: bad email addresses entering the list before the first send.

BounceZero is what came out of that observation. It's the verification system I wished I'd had when I was operating large-scale email delivery - fast, accurate, honest about its limits, no credit-expiration tricks, and operated end-to-end by people who've actually sent mail at scale.

What I built at BounceZero - and why it matters to you

BounceZero isn't an off-the-shelf product wrapped in marketing copy. The infrastructure is custom-engineered for email verification at scale, and every architectural choice maps to something you actually feel as a customer:

5-stage validation pipeline with 65+ signals per email - syntax + RFC checks, domain reputation, SMTP RCPT TO probing, provider-specific oracles (M365 GetCredentialType, Yahoo Playwright fallback), and a custom ML scoring layer trained on 7.8M+ real verifications.
> Which means fewer "valid" addresses that still bounce - our verified-class bounce rate is 0.5%, against the 1-3% you typically see from competitors.
A dedicated /24 IP range under our own ASN, BGP-announced with RPKI-valid ROAs in RIPE/RADB. Most SaaS rent IPs that get burned by noisy neighbors.
> Which means our verification probes don't trigger false-positive blocks at Gmail, Yahoo, or Microsoft. The result lands clean instead of "unknown".
Multi-region egress pools for provider-specific routing - eu_isp for European ISPs (DBL-clean, FCrDNS-valid), gmail_ipv6 for Gmail-aware sending, US-ISP pools with residential fallback for tough catch-all providers.
> Which means we get clean answers from providers (T-Online, Free.fr, Comcast) that other verifiers silently return "unknown" on.
Patroni HA PostgreSQL cluster across multiple OVH datacenters with streaming replication, wal-g encrypted backups (libsodium), and HAProxy-fronted automatic failover.
> Which means if you hit our API with 100K emails during a Black-Friday signup spike, you don't get throttled or dropped - the cluster carries the load and fails over without you noticing.
Original DNSBL + abuse-handling automation - XARF complaint processing via Abusix AbuseHQ, real-time blacklist monitoring, automatic IP-pool isolation when reputation drops on any sub-pool.
> Which means a bad week on one IP-pool doesn't degrade your verification quality - we shed it automatically and route around it.

Why this matters for your wallet

Most verification competitors rent cloud infrastructure and pass the markup to you. We own our /24, run our own ASN, operate our own PostgreSQL cluster, and built our own ML stack.
> Which means our cost per verification is structurally lower than ZeroBounce, NeverBounce, or Kickbox - and we pass that to high-volume senders as better bulk pricing instead of keeping it as margin.

The Overhead Advantage

Legacy verifiers charge massive markups to cover their cloud-rental bills. Because we own our own infrastructure, we cut out the middleman. If you're cleaning 500K+ emails a month, you're likely overpaying competitors by thousands just to rent someone else's infrastructure.

If you verify 100K+ emails/month, the legacy players can't match the rates we can offer. Get a custom high-volume quote

Other projects

bgp_analyzer (open source, MIT) - threat-infrastructure mapping via BGP, TLS certificates, and RPKI. Born from the work of mapping IP-reputation patterns across our own /24.

Where I'm reachable

Email: [email protected] - I read all messages, reply within 24h on weekdays
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lebdayoub
GitHub: github.com/lebdayoub
BounceZero status: bouncezero.io/status

Writing

Every technical article on the BounceZero blog is written by me. I don't outsource it, and I don't publish anything I haven't actually done in production. If you find a factual error or a recommendation that contradicts your experience, please email me - I'd rather be corrected than wrong.

Read all articles I've written

Ayoub Lebda