I like this idea. It should be specified as a new extension that gives clients 
a way to trust the DKIM2 headers they see.

Third-party clients that aren't coupled to the MTA or message store currently 
have no way to establish that trust. Without it, we'll end up in a similar 
place as BIMI (leaving aside that its main problem is that’s it’s a business 
model dressed as a standard), with trust depending on provider-specific 
arrangements instead of anything the protocol guarantees.


Best,
Mauro

> On 6 Nov 2026, at 4:39 am, Bron Gondwana 
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> 
> I figured -- why not add to Fastmail (on an experimental branch, this isn't 
> shipped) some code to show what you can do with Message-Instance diffs.
> 
> This is about 150 lines of backend code and 600 lines of frontend code in 
> total (including a diff library), and implemented like this, taking advantage 
> of the super powers of JMAP:
> backend has a Message-Instance parser, if the frontend requests the 
> dkim2History parameter then it gets parsed Message-Instances is a neat JSON 
> format, from which it can calculate any header changes.
> backend has a synthetic blobId format which is x-dkim2-{m}-{blobId}.
> frontend requests Email/parse: id=x-dkim2-1-$blobId  to get a parsed version 
> of the original message, which gives it the HTML formatted version without 
> having to have any DKIM2 undo code on the client, it's all on the server 
> (which already has a library for undoing changes).
> frontend creates DOMs from the original and current message, calculates the 
> diff, and presents it graphically.
> This was a remarkably simple process thanks to the way that JMAP lets you 
> compose operations.  Yay JMAP.
> 
> Here's the pictures.  The box at the top is presented for any message with a 
> recipe which changes the message:
> 
> <image.png>
> And here's the same message with changes shown:
> <image.png>
> I should probably make the green be a little more distinct, but it's quite 
> readable.  I could easily see a UI like this being popular with more 
> technical people.  But mostly I expect the actual diffs to be looked at by 
> antispam tools and agents in the future.
> 
> DKIM2 is arriving right at the time where more and more people are having 
> automated tools look at their messages as well, and the accountability 
> tracking is really useful for agents, because they notice different things 
> than humans, and they're more easily fooled by some things - so having a 
> strictly formal definition of alignment and of change recipes play to their 
> strengths.
> 
> Bron.
> 
> 
> --
>   Bron Gondwana, CEO, Fastmail Pty Ltd / Fastmail US LLC
>   [email protected]
> 
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