Enum MachineAuthorshipSignals

Namespace

MailFathom.Domain.Emails.Authorship

Assembly

MailFathom.Domain.dll

What a message's text carried that a machine-written message carries more often than a typed one.

[Flags]
public enum MachineAuthorshipSignals

Fields

BidirectionalOverrides = 4

The text carried direction overrides in a message with no right-to-left writing to justify them.

The overrides and isolates of U+202A–U+202E and U+2066–U+2069 reorder what a reader sees away from what the bytes say, which is what conceals text in plain sight. They are ordinary in a message that genuinely mixes directions, so this is read only where the text contains no strong right-to-left character at all.

FormulaicFraming = 128

The text used more than one of the fixed phrases a text generator opens, closes, and hedges with.

Deliberately a small, closed set of whole phrases rather than a vocabulary: single words drift into ordinary use and would report the writer's register instead of the message's construction. Two are required, because one is something anybody writes.

HiddenCharacters = 1

The text carried characters that occupy no width and render as nothing.

Zero-width space, word joiner, zero-width no-break space, soft hyphen, the invisible mathematical operators, and the Mongolian vowel separator. Zero-width joiner and non-joiner are deliberately not among them: both are ordinary in Indic and Arabic script and inside emoji sequences, so counting them would report the writer's language rather than the message's construction.

None = 0

The text carried none of the signals below, which is what an ordinary typed message carries.

TagCharacters = 2

The text carried characters from the Unicode tag block, which encode readable ASCII invisibly.

U+E0000–U+E007F mirror the printable ASCII range one for one and render as nothing at all, which makes a run of them a complete hidden message rather than a disturbance in a visible one. Nothing legitimate writes them into mail; the one live use in modern text is the subdivision flag emoji, and a run belonging to one is not counted.

UniformTypography = 32

The text used typographic quotation marks throughout and no straight ones anywhere.

A message typed in a mail client mixes the two, because substitution is applied to some keystrokes and not to pasted text, quoted code, or a URL. Text assembled in one pass is uniform, which is what this reads — and a writer using an editor that substitutes everything reaches the same uniformity, so it is weighed lightly.

UnsolicitedListScaffolding = 64

The text repeated the labelled-bullet shape, where each item opens with a short bolded or colon-terminated term.

UnspacedEmDashes = 16

The text used em dashes closed up against the words on both sides, repeatedly.

The most-cited typographic mark of generated prose, and one of the weakest on its own: a writer whose editor substitutes the character reaches it honestly, which is why a single occurrence is not enough and why it is weighed as one contribution among several.

VariationSelectorRun = 8

The text carried a long run of variation selectors, which carries data rather than styling one character.

A variation selector follows one base character and selects how it is drawn, so one or two of them in sequence is ordinary. A long run encodes bytes: the selector blocks are wide enough to carry arbitrary payload, and nothing renders any of it.

Remarks

A set rather than a list of separate answers, because the members genuinely compose: a message carries any combination of them at once, they are recorded together, and they are read together to reach one likelihood. It is stored as the set it is, so a likelihood can be read back as the reasons that produced it rather than as a number whose derivation is gone.

The members fall into two groups that are weighed very differently, and the split is deliberate rather than presentational. The concealment members say the message's bytes carry characters no mail client renders, which a person typing does not produce and a program assembling text does; they are close to unambiguous and are the reason this assessment exists at all, because that is the channel by which instructions meant for a reading agent are hidden from the reader the mailbox belongs to. The prose members say the text is shaped the way a text generator shapes it, and every one of them is something a careful writer also reaches — none of them means anything alone.

A member that is present is a fact about the text. It is never a finding against the message or its sender, and nothing in this system acts on one.