email:message

Summary

email:message identifies a specific email message by its canonical message fingerprint.

Subject

subject MUST be of type email_message_fingerprint.

Motivation

This kind lets a Chronicle pubkey publicly back one specific email message, not only an email address in general.

It is useful for message-level filtering and ranking, where the receiver wants to know whether this exact message was backed by a pubkey with public credibility at stake.

Embedded proof

To make the backing discoverable by receivers, a sender SHOULD include:

• X-Chronicle-Event: <event-id>

X-Chronicle-Event is the Chronicle event id of the backing email:message event.

A receiver can resolve that event, recompute the email_message_fingerprint from the received message, and verify that the resolved Chronicle event has:

• kind = "email:message"
• subject = <recomputed email_message_fingerprint>

Address binding

email:message proves that a Chronicle pubkey backed a specific email message fingerprint.

By itself, it does not prove that the signing pubkey controls the sender address. Clients may treat it as stronger when the same pubkey has also emitted email:verify for the sender address.