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AECS

10. Conformance

Requiredness is stated throughout this document as it comes up (§2, §4, §5, §6). This section collects it into one checklist. An implementation is AECS-1-conformant if and only if it satisfies every point below:

  1. Every produced object has non-null messageId and threadId (§4.1) — these are the only two fields this spec requires to always be present and non-null. When no valid Message-ID header exists, messageId MUST be synthetic per §4.1.1.
  2. Producers SHOULD represent unpopulated optional fields as explicit null (or, for attachments, an empty array). A conformant consumer MUST treat an omitted field and an explicit null identically (§2, §4.1).
  3. threadId is computed using the exact algorithm in §5.2, including the validity definition in §5.1 and the encoding rules in §5.4 for the fallback hash — not an approximation that happens to agree on common-case input.
  4. thread.position is null unless computed from a fully-available, timestamp-sorted thread per §4.4 — never a value guessed from a single message.
  5. All timestamps satisfy §6 exactly: UTC, ISO 8601 with explicit offset, Unix epoch seconds, and null-not-guessed when the source Date header is absent or unparseable.
  6. Unknown/custom fields are namespaced per §9 when producing, and ignored (not an error, not a validation failure) when consuming.
  7. content.rawFull, if populated, is byte-faithful to the original message — conformance does not require populating it (§2’s “flexible by design”), but if present it MUST NOT be normalized, re-encoded, or otherwise altered from the source.

A conformant implementation is NOT required to populate every content.* level (§4.3 already says implementations SHOULD populate what they’re capable of, not MUST populate all) — the bar is that whatever is populated follows the rules above, not that everything is populated. See specs/conformance/ for machine-checkable fixtures covering points 3–5, and specs/schema/normalized-email.schema.json for a JSON Schema covering points 1, 2, and 6 (shape and nullability).