Damon Atkins wrote:

Just keep in mine Signed Emails, the email contents needs to be present back to the client as it came, so the client says the email has not been altered.

Timo will presumably correct me if I am wrong: I believe it is already a design goal that messages going in to the mail store will come out byte-for-byte verbatim at the RFC5322 message stream level.

I suppose the suggestion to come out of this is that if there is to be any partial or complete RFC2045-deconstruction of messages that this will suggest to some people the possibility of non-verbatim retrieval, and it might be an idea for the documentation to make it clear whether or not stored messages will be retrieved verbatim at the RFC5322 message stream level.

It might be useful if the documentation gave confidence-building examples such as "for example, blocks of base64 encoded data will only be stored in decoded form if, when re-encoded, the original base64 stream can be reconstructed byte-for-byte verbatim".

Or if messages might not come back verbatim, it might be useful if the documentation were to explain what scenarios it might not be verbatim, and the nature of the differences which may occur.

Bill