Support for importing S/MIME‑signed emails

[weberhannis]

Description

Summary

Paperless‑NGX currently cannot import emails that are S/MIME‑signed (e.g., multipart/signed or application/pkcs7-signature). These messages are skipped or rejected by the mail consumer, even though the email content itself is not encrypted and remains fully readable.

Problem

Many organizations use S/MIME signatures by default to ensure message integrity. While the message body and attachments are not encrypted, Paperless‑NGX treats signed emails as unsupported and does not process them. This prevents automated ingestion of documents that arrive via signed email channels.

Expected behavior

Paperless‑NGX should:

• accept and import signed but unencrypted S/MIME emails,
• extract the message body and attachments normally,
• ignore the signature part unless validation is explicitly implemented later,
• optionally store a metadata flag such as signed: true.
  Signature validation is not required for this feature request; the goal is simply to allow import of signed emails.

Current behavior

• S/MIME‑signed emails are not imported.
• The mail consumer either errors out or silently skips the message.
• Users must manually strip signatures or forward the email in an unsigned form.

Why this matters

• S/MIME signatures are widely used in corporate, governmental, and professional environments.
• Signed emails are not encrypted; their content is fully accessible and should be processable.
• The lack of support breaks automated workflows and forces manual intervention.

Scope

This request covers only S/MIME‑signed (integrity‑protected) emails, not S/MIME‑encrypted emails.
Encrypted email support would be a separate feature.

Other

Other Request
Encrypted email support

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