How do I know my account is fully set up?

A working Valid Email Checker account has four observable signs. Walking through them takes under two minutes and tells you definitively whether something is wrong with the setup or whether you are good to go.

Check 1: your email is confirmed

Sign in at /auth/login with your password. If the login succeeds and lands you on the dashboard at /overview, your email is verified. If instead you see a "please confirm your email" banner blocking the dashboard, the confirmation link was never clicked or the click was lost — request a fresh one from the login screen.

Check 2: 200 credits show in the sidebar widget

Look at the credit balance widget in the top-right of the dashboard. A fully set-up account shows "200" under Pay-As-You-Go. If it shows zero, your welcome bonus did not land — see why did I get fewer than 200 welcome credits for the most likely causes.

Check 3: a Welcome bonus row exists in Credits History

Click Credits History in the sidebar. You should see one row with transaction_type = welcome_bonus and +200 to your PAYG bucket. That row is permanent — even after you spend the credits it stays, so you always have an audit trail. If the row is missing, the grant call did not run and you should contact support.

Check 4: a single email verification succeeds

Paste any real email into the verifier widget at the top of the dashboard and click Verify. You should see a result in under 2 seconds with a clear status (Safe / Risky / Invalid / one of the others). Open Credits History again and confirm a new row appears under the verification charge. That round trip — verify, see result, see credit deducted — confirms every layer of the platform is working: auth, credits, the verification engine, and the database.

Bonus check: 2FA is enabled

This is optional but recommended. Go to Account Settings, Security tab, and enable authenticator-app 2FA. On a paid account holding card-on-file and credit balance, 2FA is worth the 60 seconds of setup.