[OpenID] Relationship of OpenID URLs and e-mail addresses

[Guido Sohne]

On 4/4/07, Hamish Allan <hamish at gmail.com> wrote:
> On a not entirely unrelated note, has anyone considered the use of
> OpenIDs as email addresses?
>
> Imagine a service openidmail.com which offers email addresses based on
> OpenIDs. I can immediately set up my mail client to connect to
> smtp.openidmail.com and send email with a from: address of
> openid.aol.com/me at openidmail.com and a to: address of
> you.myopenid.com at openidmail.com. You can receive it by setting up your
> mail client to receive mail from imap.openidmail.com. Authentication
> can be handled using e.g., session cookies as passwords for TLS.
> Spammers would presumably set up their own identity providers, which
> could quickly be blacklisted.
>
> Has this already been discussed?

How is this a step forward to replicate email but with longer
addresses? The user's email is not the same as the user's identity. It
is very common, yes, and universal, yes, but it's not the identity, I
think. What about chat nicknames? Should they go OpenID too?

Maybe I'm missing something ...

-- G.