OpenID - getting mass take up, anti-spam?

[Martin Atkins]

Johannes Ernst wrote:
> 
> The biggest issue in all of this is integration with e-mail clients. The 
> receiving end is relatively straightforward, but the sending one isn't. (Maybe 
> you have some better ideas that I do on this, if so, let's hear them!)
> 

It seems pretty easy from webmail, but not easy at all for a desktop
client. OpenID (and presumably LID too?) doesn't really work outside of
a web browser.

I did, back in the early days of OpenID, write a non-web OpenID consumer
that worked by making a request to the server supplying a dummy URL and
parsing the response arguments right out of the redirect URL rather than
following the redirect. This is obviously a big hack, and still requires
that there be a browser available to do the optional "Do you want to
allow this site?" step that some servers do. It has the ugly feature
that LiveJournal asks:

Do you want to allow:
    http://www.suspicious-looking-dummy-url.com/
...do know you are you?
   [Yes] [No]

Also, this was based on the original OpenID protocol. I don't remember
how it worked in enough detail to be able to quickly guess whether it
would work on the released OpenID protocol or on LID.