Finding validated users

[Ville]

On my site some other features [in addition to the board] are available only to those users who have registered on the bulletin board. Currently, anyone who is registered can access them (say, chat, for example), but I'd like to allow only those users access the additional services who are registered AND validated (i.e. who have responded to the validation email and whom I subsequently have approved as a new user).

Currently I create MD5 hash from the password the user has entered, and then compare it to the result of...
SELECT password FROM user WHERE username="$boardname";

So my question is... where is the validation information stored?

Oh, I'm using 2.3.2 'til the final 3.0 is released.