Comments on: Announcing Emailtoid: mapping email addresses to OpenIDs

By: OpenID usability is not an oxymoron | FactoryCity

OpenID usability is not an oxymoron | FactoryCity — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 20:47:53 +0000

[...] is my opinion that enabling an email address to be used as a “hint” that resolves to a valid OpenID URL is a necessary step to dislodge one of the main nettles [...]

By: Independent study on OpenID awareness using Mechanical Turk | FactoryCity

Independent study on OpenID awareness using Mechanical Turk | FactoryCity — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 05:42:45 +0000

[...] also that momentum to rev the protocol to accommodate email addresses in OpenID is just now gaining [...]

By: Vincent

Vincent — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 21:26:44 +0000

It does sound like an interesting idea, provided that, instead of redirecting the user to emailtoid, you send an email out to the user yourself and provide him with an OpenID based on a code in that email.

By: OpenID per E-Mail at notizBlog - a private weblog written by Matthias Pfefferle

OpenID per E-Mail at notizBlog - a private weblog written by Matthias Pfefferle — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 18:00:30 +0000

[...] (via) « Wie viel Portabilitiy brauchen wir noch? [...]

By: Enterprise Messaging

Enterprise Messaging — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 11:37:17 +0000

Sounds like an interesting service.

By: Chris Messina

Chris Messina — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 14:47:44 +0000

@Pascal: Well, that’s a huge problem actually — that’s like having competing DNS providers! Again, ideally the email providers will adopt the discovery solution — or will themselves delegate/redirect to a third-party OpenID provider. Having multiple email-to-OpenID mappers would actually be pretty bad and one of the reasons why Emailtoid is potentially problematic as a privately-run project…

However, it pushes the idea out there and forces us to confront any potential technical issues with using email addresses as OpenIDs. AFAIC in that case, it’s a useful exercise and service until email providers get hip to providing identity on their own.

By: Pascal Van Hecke

Pascal Van Hecke — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 12:34:39 +0000

If this idea catches on, existing openid providers will compete for relying parties to choose them (i.e. the openid providers) as fallback service… probably by including it in an affiliate program (such as the one that myopenid already has in place).

By: Chris Messina

Chris Messina — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 17:10:32 +0000

@Stephen: AFAIK, the OpenID spec forbids using http://user@example.com as a valid OpenID, so this doesn’t change anything.

By: Stephen Paul Weber

Stephen Paul Weber — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 14:55:22 +0000

Biggest issue I have with this is that currently:

user@example.com

get’s mapped to

http://user@example.com/

Which is a valid URL and may in fact be their OpenID. This re-mapping idea changes this a lot.

By: links for 2008-06-23 « Breyten’s Dev Blog

links for 2008-06-23 « Breyten’s Dev Blog — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 11:30:52 +0000

[...] Announcing Emailtoid: mapping email addresses to OpenIDs (tags: citizen-centric web digital identity technology usability building emailtoid openid) [...]