RPostal

Digital Seal Timestamps

The Digital Seal® email authentication service provides the recipient with proof of original time of transmission of an email.

Standard email is easily edited, times associated with delivery can be manipulated, and sender addresses may be easily spoofed. An email sent as a Registered Email™ message with a Digital Seal® mark not only returns a Registered Receipt™ email proof of delivery record for the sender, but also provides the recipient a simple way to verify original content, and original timestamp of transmission.

The Digital Seal® technology reconstructs the electronic originals on demand, for any recipient or future recipient if the email has been forwarded to others or saved in a storage drive.

This Digital Seal® serves as the ultimate forensic evidence of the email transmission, timestamp, and authorship.

A Certified Email™ transmission is the combination of the Registered Email™ delivery proof plus the Digital Seal® sender authentication technologies.

UTC – Universal Time Coordinates Timestamp. Registered Email™ receipts, Certified Email™ transmissions, and Digital Seal authentication records include timestamps that may be displayed in local time (of the sender) and/or “universal time” formally known as “Coordinated Universal Time”. This term comes from the French word temps universel coordonné, abbreviated as UTC, and is the successor to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). It is the primary standard of time by which the world regulates time and does not observe daylight saving time. UTC is used in many Internet and World Wide Web standards. The Network Time Protocol, designed to synchronize the clocks of computers over the Internet, encodes times using the UTC system. Computer servers, online services and other entities that rely on having a universally accepted time use UTC as it is more specific than GMT. Time zones are usually defined as differing from UTC by an integer number of hours, although the laws of each jurisdiction would have to be consulted if sub-second accuracy was required. Several jurisdictions have established time zones that differ by an integer number of half-hours or quarter-hours from UT1 or UTC. UTC does not change with a change of seasons, but local time or civil time may change if a time zone jurisdiction observes daylight saving time (summer time). For example, local time on the east coast of the United States is five hours behind UTC during winter, but four hours behind while daylight saving is observed there.

Unlike Digital Signatures on email, which are not recognized by most browser-based email programs and which lose their integrity if an email is forwarded or modified by anti-virus filters, the Digital Seal® technology applies a durable authentication mechanism that stays with the email regardless of how many times it is be forwarded, scanned, or saved.

Contact our integration team to learn more about how you can add Registered Email™, RMail, and RSign services to your workflows.