How e-signatures work
How Missived e-signatures work
Coming soon — in legal review. E-signatures stay switched off on every plan until the owner completes counsel review. Business will include unlimited envelopes under fair use, with daily sending safeguards. This page describes the implementation and its limits.
Signing in plain words
A sender prepares a PDF and places fields. You receive an email link, open the document on the signing page and check you can read it, agree to electronic records, and adopt a typed name and style as your signature. The sender may also require an emailed code; we recommend it for higher-stakes agreements, because it shows the signer had the inbox when they opened the document to sign. Several people can sign or approve in order; everyone receives a completed copy.
The US ESIGN Act and state UETA laws generally recognise electronic records and signatures. Whether a particular document qualifies depends on the document, the parties and applicable law. Missived offers simple electronic signatures, not notarisation, witnessing or EU qualified signatures. Do not use it for wills, family-law or court documents, documents requiring notarisation, certain legal notices (such as utility shut-off, eviction, foreclosure, insurance cancellation and product-recall notices), or remote IRS Forms 8879 / 8878 (which require Knowledge-Based Authentication). Which documents are left out. Ask your adviser about your use case.
The document seal
After everyone finishes, Missived draws the completed fields into the PDF and adds a certificate of completion. A digital seal covers the whole file; altering the file breaks the seal. Our seal uses a self-issued certificate. Adobe Acrobat shows it as valid with an unknown issuer: that's expected, because the certificate is not on Adobe's Approved Trust List, and the seal still proves the file hasn't changed since it was sealed. A valid seal proves integrity relative to that key, not that a government verified the people who signed.
A trusted timestamp
When configured, an RFC 3161 trusted timestamp is added to the seal. The default hosted authority is DigiCert. It receives a SHA-256 hash only, plus a random request nonce and the server's network address — never your PDF, name, email or field values. Self-hosted timestamping is off by default; operators may choose an authority or disable it.
Temporary failures retry in the completion job. After three failed attempts the envelope still completes, and its certificate says “No trusted timestamp (yet).” Completed copies stay unchanged: Missived does not silently replace a PDF you downloaded. A timestamp proves the seal existed by that time; it is not an identity check.
Your certificate and tamper-evident record
The certificate lists the document fingerprints, parties, authentication steps, consent text fingerprint, signature adoption, signing times, IP addresses and browsers. Every step is in an append-only hash chain. The certificate contains the chain head, and the PDF seal protects the certificate. A nightly check looks for changes to recent records. These are evidence of the ceremony, not a guarantee against every form of fraud.
Verify independently
Open the downloaded PDF in Adobe Acrobat Reader. Open the Signatures panel, select the Missived seal, then Signature Properties → Validate Signature. Inspect document integrity, whether the whole document is covered, certificate details and the timestamp. An unknown issuer is expected for our self-issued seal; do not mark a certificate trusted merely to remove a warning.
You can also use the European Commission's EU DSS demonstration validator, which checks the seal and the timestamp.
Privacy warning: the EU DSS validator is an external service. Uploading a file sends the entire PDF to their servers. Only use it with non-sensitive samples, or run the open-source DSS validator on your own computer for private documents.
Check a copy with Missived: your browser calculates SHA-256 and sends only that fingerprint. This confirms whether it matches a completed copy in our records. Independent validation also checks the PDF seal itself.
What we store
Missived stores the source and prepared PDF, completed PDF and certificate, recipients' email addresses, consent and adopted signature, field values, authentication events, IP addresses, browsers and timestamps. Attachments are encrypted at rest; text follows the workspace's encryption settings. Access is limited to the envelope's parties and authorised workspace staff. Recipients can download behind an emailed code for 90 days. Senders keep access in their workspace for as long as the workspace exists: a sent envelope can't be deleted, and it stays with the workspace even if the sender or a signer closes their Missived account. Deleting the workspace deletes its envelopes. We strongly recommend all parties keep a downloaded copy for their permanent records. See our privacy promise for the infrastructure providers and privacy details.
Business fair use
Business has no monthly envelope limit. Workspaces younger than 30 days can send 200 envelopes per UTC day; established workspaces can send 2,000. Signing emails use a separate sending subdomain and category with our existing mail provider. A spam complaint, or at least five bounces making up at least 5% of a day's signing mail, pauses that workspace's signing emails for review and alerts the platform admins. Contact support if sending is paused.