

Dear World, email addresses are not identity - zinxq
http://mailinator.blogspot.com/2008/08/dear-world-email-addresses-are-not.html

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charlesmount
Hi article does not really address the point he makes in the title. Email is
the best source of primary identity for web applications. If you are building
a business application that people want, over 95% of the time people will give
you valid email addresses. User are so much more valuable if you can market to
them over time. It is very difficult to do this without at least an email
address. Of course people can get disposable email accounts, this is just
stating the obvious but still does not help at all in suggesting a better
alternative for primary identity.

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notauser
I fall into the 5%. If it's something I really want to try... I'll look harder
for a temp e-mail domain that you haven't blocked yet. New ones spring up
every day.

Why make it harder for me, as you are just pissing me off?

If I like it I'll give you my real details, but the Internet is full of
spammers and crooks and by default it seems prudent to assume that all
websites are run by those types until proven otherwise.

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nebula
Why not have a permanent mail id that you use only on sites that you don't
trust.

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fizx
Neither are SSNs, but hey...

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aneesh
Well, they're not completely ineffective. How many people do you know that
have two or more SSNs? How about multiple email addresses?

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tomsaffell
I've heard of it going the other way, i.e. one SSN maps to multiple people (or
at least multiple _names_ ).

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awt
Would be cool if he had discussed some alternaties...

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btw0
What should be a good online identity? It's an open problem nobody has yet
solved.

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aneesh
Facebook is trying to solve it.

It's easy to create a new email account. It's much harder (though not
impossibly so) to create a fake identity with 150 friends.

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Devilboy
That's true, although I kinda like being pseudo-anonymous on most public
forums.

Also meet my friend: <http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=622877592>

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vyrotek
Even if a service existed that would manage your online identity, how would
you prove at you are yourself everytime you sign in? I think thats the biggest
problem right now. Another problem is the second someone gains access to your
'online identity' they now have access to everything else that was also linked
using this identity.

So maybe its not a good idea to have a central identity manager. Maybe we just
need to be researching how do we prove that you are indeed YOU when you visit
a site again and not worry about figuring out if you are you AND the same
person on x,y,z sites.

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KevinMS
Almost every email address carries an implicit username/password as well as a
degree of identity provided by dns services (where the email goes)

So thats not bad proof that the person that recieves an email to that address
will receive the next one, and thats where all the login info is passed
around.

Mailinator however breaks all this, you can use any email address you want,
including one that somebody else is using. Maybe this blog is a little biased?

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sanj
I wonder if there is a market for providing real, verified identities. Not
requiring them, mind you, but streamlining things if you provide it:

like the Clear security program in airports that lets you skip the lines.

