Signup Quality Glossary — SignupDoggy

A glossary of signup-quality, fraud-detection, and email-validation terms: disposable email, role-based email, MX record, Tor exit node, VPN/hosting ASN, IP risk score, bot detection, and more.

Signup Quality Glossary

A glossary of every term you need to understand signup validation, fraud detection, and email-risk scoring. Plain-English definitions with examples and links to deeper reading.

DISPOSABLE EMAIL

A disposable email (also: temporary email, throwaway email, burner email, fake email, temp mail) is an email address that self-destructs after a short window — usually 10 minutes to 24 hours. Used by bots, free-trial abusers, and privacy-conscious users. The six biggest providers are tempmail.com, guerrillamail.com, mailinator.com, 10minutemail.com, yopmail.com, and throwawaymail.com, which together account for ~60% of disposable signups. The remaining 40% is a long tail of ~200,000 smaller providers.

ROLE-BASED EMAIL

A role-based email (also: role account, shared mailbox) is an address like admin@, support@, abuse@, sales@, or webmaster@. These are shared mailboxes, not personal inboxes — signups from them rarely convert and often belong to bots or competitors scraping your form.

MX RECORD

An MX (Mail Exchange) record is a DNS record that tells other mail servers where to deliver email for a domain. If a domain has no MX record, no real mail can be sent to it — every address @thatdomain is unreachable.

TOR EXIT NODE

A Tor exit node is the final relay in a Tor circuit — the IP address that traffic appears to come from when a user connects to your service through Tor. Signups from Tor exit nodes are almost always bots, abusers, or journalists — never paying customers.

VPN / HOSTING ASN

An ASN (Autonomous System Number) is a unique number assigned to every IP block on the internet. Datacenter ASNs and VPN-provider ASNs are owned by infrastructure providers — not residential ISPs. A signup from one of these ASNs is almost always a bot.

IP RISK SCORE

An IP risk score is a 0–1 number representing how likely a given IP is to be associated with fraud. Scores above 0.7 typically warrant a hard block; scores 0.4–0.7 warrant a manual review.

BOT SIGNUP

A bot signup is a programmatic account creation — usually by a headless browser or a Python script with curl. Bot signups cost SaaS companies 5–30% of their signup volume.

CAPTCHA

A CAPTCHA is a challenge-response test designed to distinguish humans from bots. Cloudflare Turnstile is the most common in 2026 — frictionless to 95% of real users.

EMAIL VALIDATION VS VERIFICATION

Email validation checks the FORMAT. Email verification checks the MAILBOX. Neither one is fraud detection — that's a third, separate problem.

RISK BAND / RECOMMENDATION

A risk band is a categorical label (low / medium / high) returned alongside the risk score. A recommendation is the action the API suggests (allow / review / block).

PAY-PER-CALL PRICING

Pay-per-call pricing is a billing model where the customer pays only for the API calls they make — no monthly minimum, no subscription. SignupDoggy uses this model.

E-E-A-T

E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) is Google's framework for evaluating content quality. High E-E-A-T signals include an author bio with verifiable credentials and contact information.