Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard

Email is an open standard, or several standards, as well as being many other things, such as a means of communication. Something that people might consider from time to time is “Why there is so much unsolicited bulk email?”, although for some people the answer is obvious. Others might not ever ask themselves that question, even if they use email, because they believe the spam problem has been beaten, but it hasn’t, and it is costing email providers and society a lot of money. I have been thinking about this issue myself recently, and on and off for a while, and I have some thoughts about it. While I have neither come up with a means for ending all spam, nor decided that the current email system should be abandoned, I do have a collection of thoughts which help me frame the issue and might help other people in some way.

I haven’t written many blog posts about open standards recently, and that’s possibly because all the old standards are too boring and the new ones are too immature, but I think that OpenID has now matured enough and is seeing enough adoption that it is reasonable to comment on it. It is also receiving a lot of criticism, and, while I don’t like to get caught up in knee-jerk arguments, I do feel that there are some legitimate concerns that people have about this promising standard, which I might be able to address with a coherent defence of it in this blog post. Fortunately the defence I’ve come up with should answer many of the objections to OpenID at the same time, as it puts forward a very different way of looking at the technology, one which may not be obvious to people when they first learn about it. I will first state my idea clearly for the record, then deal with any criticism I can imagine being levelled against it.