Practical evidence is not technical proof. Methods of technical proof don’t cover all the potential legal challenges.
The goal is establishing terms before judge or jury. Do that and the court can enforce.
I have developed my signature so that nobody can replicate it fluently. I also use special one off archival ink that nobody else in the world has.
Emails do not have any default mechanism like that, especially if they only rest on servers of the interested parties. Emails are just bytes and can be easily edited.
I've seen contracts where parties initialed each page. Don't ask me why. I don't think I've ever seen a contract of more than one page signed on each page.
I own several bottles of Noodler's ink. If I ever sue on a paper contract, I expect I'll be sending a scan or a photocopy into evidence.
There's nothing magical about pen and ink, new or old. We just have a longer history with it. Everything's just evidence.
When you sign multi page document you sign every page. This is standard legal practice.
When I receive negotiated contract for signing it is usual to expect the contract has already been at the very least initialed on every page by the other party. And I always initial every page of the contract whether the other party did it or not.
Signing every page is not required for the contract to be enforceable but is standard practice.
And it is idiotic, of course.
> I have developed my signature so that nobody can replicate it fluently.
Robots that hold and move a pen have been created to forge signatures.
> I also use special one off archival ink that nobody else in the world has.
I’m not sure if you’re being serious or not because this is absolutely hilarious, but in the event that you are, does this have any purpose? You could use this excuse to secretly “poison” a contract that you intend on breaking (by using a normal pen to sign it).
> Emails do not have any default mechanism like that, especially if they only rest on servers of the interested parties.
Gmail accounts are free and support DKIM. If both parties conduct business over Gmail, those messages have irrevocable sender authenticity. This inability to refute the contents of an email spelled disaster in the USA for the Democratic political party during their 2016 presidential campaign.
Also stuck thinking gmail is involved in every email exchange. It is not.
A DKIM signature attests that some subset of the headers (typically including the From: header) are "authentic". The mailserver cannot attest the authenticity of the sender; it cannot attest more than it knows, which is that the logged-in account is allowed to send mail using that sender address. It can't attest who was using the account.
DKIM is a spam-prevention scheme. It doesn't provide non-repudiability.