email:message

Summary

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

Fields

• subject MUST be of type email_message_fingerprint and identifies the email message being backed.
• amount MUST be positive. Its magnitude represents the cost committed to the message.

Purpose

Backing a specific email message with a Chronicle pubkey and committed cost.

This allows a message itself to carry a public signal independently of the sender address more generally.

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.