Why do software companies continue to tie software keys, licenses etc to email addresses? Most people have multiple email addresses, and they tend to be perishable and short lived.

I use a service called Pobox.com that addresses some of the issues. It allows me to have an address like myname@pobox.com which I can give out to anyone, and then I tell the service what actual email address or addresses I want the mail forwarded to. They also offer a number of other services such as rules you can apply to incoming email, spam filtering and scoring, and you can even use your own domain. Check em out!

But while this helps, I don't always want to give this address out to vendors. So I often use a throwaway address like me@yahoo.com or some other email address I don't mind getting spammed into oblivion.

Yet vendors want to use our email address to identify us. I can't tell you how many products I still use that were originally licensed to me via an old work specific email address. And invariably when it comes time for an upgrade and I have to retrieve my license details I have to enter the email address I used when I purchased the software.

Sometimes they even send the license or upgrade details only to the email address you used when you purchased the software. And on the rare times I have tried to convince a vendor that they should change my email address in their records it usually results in my account being forever irretrievable even by the vendor! sigh.

In fact a fair number of vendors appear to use your email address as an input into their key generation routines.

An email address is a poor identifier, yet its use as an identifier is prevalent. We need a better method for identifying ourselves electronically. I have been reading about OpenID lately and of all the attempts I have seen in the past (Passport anyone?) it seems to have the most promise. As far as I can tell the organization is not owned or unduly influenced by any particular vendor. And it does appear to be a truly open standard. 

We need something other than email addresses, perhaps this is it?

Cheers,

Robert Porter