We’re proud to announce that Draft 5 of the Email Address to URL Transformation (EAUT) specification is now available. What does this mean to me you may be asking yourself? It means that coming soon to an OpenID login form near you, you will be able to use your email address as an OpenID.

In basic terms EAUT makes it easy to take an email address and transform it into an URL, making your email work with services like OpenID. The goal with Emailtoid is to demonstrate the technology and provide a fallback solution for a larger, decentralized network based on the EAUT specification.

Using an email addresses as a login is already a familiar process. The problem is that an email address is not very useful as an endpoint for identity information. A URL is much better for storing identity information, though using a URL to login is counter intuitive. This is the usability disconnect that EAUT aims to address.

With EAUT, email providers can host an XRDS document at their root (eg, aol.com). Here’s an example XRDS document:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″ ?>
<XRDS xmlns=”xri://$xrds”>
    <XRD xml:id=”main” xmlns=”xri://$xrd*($v*2.0)” version=”2.0″ xmlns:simple=”http://xrds-simple.net/core/1.0″ xmlns:openid=”http://openid.net/xmlns/1.0″>
        <Type>xri://$xrds*simple</Type>
        <Service priority=”10″>

            <Type>http://specs.eaut.org/1.0/template</Type>
            <URI>http://openid.aol.com/%7Busername%7D</URI>
        </Service>
    </XRD>
</XRDS>

If the example email is vidooprocks@aol.com, The above XRDS document, hosted on aol.com, would mean that the resulting URL is http://openid.aol.com/vidooprocks - which is a valid OpenID (or would be if somebody had that email).

Now, what happens when the email provider doesn’t have an XRDS document, or has one but doesn’t have any EAUT types in there? You use a fallback service - just like Emailtoid!

With EAUT, relying parties can now have the best of both worlds. They can ask for email addresses, which people are used to, but still only have to implement OpenID. Please let us know if you have any questions or feedback on our Emailtoid support page.