What happens immediately after I confirm my email?

After you click the confirmation link in your Valid Email Checker signup email, three things happen on our side in the same fraction of a second. Then we redirect you to the login page so you can sign in cleanly. Here is the full sequence from the moment you click.

Step 1: your email is marked verified

The token in the link tells our auth system that the address you signed up with belongs to you. Your user record flips from email_confirmed = false to email_confirmed = true. From this point on, the "please verify your email" wall is gone, and you can log in with your password (or with Continue with Google if that is how you signed up).

Step 2: 200 welcome credits land in your bucket

Our award-welcome-credits function runs immediately after verification. It checks that this is genuinely your first credit grant on the account (so you cannot trigger it twice by clicking the link more than once), then deposits 200 credits into your Pay-As-You-Go bucket. PAYG is the bucket that never expires, so these credits sit there until you use them — whether that is in your first hour or six months from now.

Step 3: a Welcome bonus row is logged

A row is written to your Credits History with transaction_type = welcome_bonus and +200 against your PAYG bucket. This is a permanent record — even after you spend the credits, the row stays so you can always confirm the grant happened. See what does the Welcome bonus entry mean for more on reading the history.

Step 4: you are redirected to /auth/login

We deliberately do not leave a session open after the grant. The page redirects you to the login screen so you can enter your password (or click Continue with Google) on a clean slate. If you set up two-factor authentication later, this is where you would also pass the 2FA challenge. After login you land on the dashboard at /overview with your 200 credits already visible in the sidebar widget.