[OpenID] OpenID based on email addresses... Just Works!

David Fuelling sappenin at gmail.com
Thu Oct 30 16:41:57 UTC 2008


On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 4:08 PM, Martin Atkins <mart at degeneration.co.uk>wrote:

> David Fuelling wrote:
>
>>
>> This line of reasoning doesn't make sense if you're thinking of an email
>> address as a "1st-Class" OpenID.  However, if your OpenID is really an XRI
>> or URL (only), then your email address becomes a surrogate for your OpenID,
>> or a pointer.  That's why email addresses are a special case -- today
>> they're not really OpenID's, so if we're going to start using them "like"
>> openId's, then we need to add a lot of flexibility into the mechanism so
>> that (at a domain owner's discretion, and the discretion of user controling
>> a particular email address in that domain) any particular email address can
>> be a surrogate for any of that user's OpenIDs.
>>
>> Besides, with OpenID 2.0, I can use a particular URL (e.g.,
>> http://openid.sappenin.com/david) but it really "maps" to my acutal
>> OpenID (http://sappenin.myopenid.com <http://sappenin.myopenid.com/>).
>>  It seems odd that so many people are arguing to take away this feature of
>> OpenIDs when it comes to email addresses.
>>
>>
>
> In the delegation case, the URL you enter is still the claimed_identifier.
> Using the email address as the claimed identifier -- which can optionally
> delegate to another identifier -- is in fact *more* consistent with OpenID
> delegation as it exists today. And that is, in fact, what
> mart at degeneration.co.uk is currently configured to do, per my DNS
> proposal.
>
> I think it's important to avoid changing the model when we go over to email
> addresses. Email addresses are just another URL scheme.
>
> While OpenID does have some limitations, we should solve them on a broader
> level so that they apply to all identifier types, and keep the core protocol
> and model the same regardless of what URL scheme your identifier happens to
> use.
>

The problem with using the mailto: schemed identifier as the
"claimed_identifier" is that it is not "commonly resolvable" in the same way
that a URL is.  It requires a "mapping scheme" (like EAUT) or some other
translation mechanism (DNS lookup?), which isn't built into common software
like the web-browser, my blackberry, my iPhone, my Tivo, the space shuttle,
etc.

Firefox aside, I think it will be an uphill battle to try to get a
mailto:schemed identifier to be supported on all the various platforms
out there.
We should be sticking to URLs as identifiers, which is why mapping the email
address to a URL seems like a better plan than using the mailto: scheme as a
new form of OpenID Identifier.

I know there are good arguements for/against -- this is a years-old
debate....but I think it's essentially what we're disagreeing about --
should the email address be the OpenID, or should it just map to an OpenID.
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