I'll readily admit my ignorance on the finer points of signatures and what you wrote makes sense to me, but using the hope that an email address will reach the

I'll readily admit my ignorance on the finer points of signatures and what you wrote makes sense to me, but using the hope that an email address will reach the intended recipient, and the intended recipient only, as your trust anchor, the whole system is basically no better than sending an email that says > If you agree to buy this house for $100, just click reply, type your name and then hit send. All the fancy PDF displays and contract-signing-skeumorphisms just create a fuzzy-warm feeling, but don't actually do anything. Which seemed a little odd to me as a way to authorize parts of a mortgage.