ARC seal absent on forwarded email (spoofed relay)
missing-arc-seal-validation
What this tier means
High-confidence threat indicator — phishing, impersonation, BEC, or scam pattern. Strong contributor to the trash decision.
How Gorganizer detects this
ARC (Authenticated Received Chain) headers are added by mail forwarders and mailing-list managers to preserve DMARC authentication results across relay hops. A genuinely forwarded email always carries an arc-seal header stamped by the forwarding infrastructure. This signal fires when a message shows explicit forwarding evidence — a "Fwd:" / "fw:" subject prefix or a canonical body marker ("-------- Forwarded message --------" / "Begin forwarded message") — and has passed through 2+ Received hops, yet the arc-seal header is entirely absent. The combination strongly suggests the forwarding cues were forged: the email was never relayed through real forwarding infrastructure, it was simply crafted to appear forwarded in order to inherit the trust heuristics granted to forwarded mail. Guard: does not fire for senders matching the strict_invoice, strict_work, or strict_shopping allowlists, as known-good corporate forwarders sometimes omit ARC. Score: +3 trash.
False-positive guard
Every signal in Gorganizer feeds a multi-module score — never a sole verdict. This is a threat-tier signal — it adds a strong contribution to the trash score. The full pipeline still requires convergence across multiple modules + a margin over the safety floor before deletion happens, and Gmail's trash (30-day recovery) is always used — never permanent delete.
About the scoring engine
Gorganizer's scoring engine emits 2,143+ signals across six modules — headers, sender, subject, body, attachments, and structural metadata. Every email is scored by every module independently; the final verdict requires multiple modules to agree and the trash score to beat the safety floor by a margin.
Sacred safety guards — never delete starred emails, replies, calendar invites, receipts/invoices, or attachments — apply unconditionally regardless of any signal.
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