The notion that paper letters are more authentic than digital has always confused me. If you can forge a realistic-looking PDF, you can also print it. On the ot

The notion that paper letters are more authentic than digital has always confused me. If you can forge a realistic-looking PDF, you can also print it. On the other hand, an email still on Gmail's servers with headers showing its authenticated origin, or a document held in escrow by Docusign, seems like far more rigorous evidence in a hypothetical court dispute. And I'd have my bank statements as corroborating evidence, rather than relying on one company Ideally, companies would have well-known public keys and sign every PDF they send you. In practice, they don't, but it's not even (feasibly) possible to sign a paper letter, unless we're still counting a printed squiggle as some sort of proof. Holograms and other genuinely hard-to-print marks are presumably very effective against non-sophisticated forgers, but I only see them on a few government documents, not mortgage papers Also I'm aware that printers print identifying dots, and that is probably the downfall of many amateur forgers, but only because it allows you to find a smoking gun if the document is forged (and the printer was suspected a priori). But I imagine it's a lot harder to use that in the other direction, where a customer wants to prove a document did come from some company, as they'll presumably struggle to get their hands on the signatures of all the company's printers