A bold but simple login system

This would drive me up the wall. I don't want to have to sit in my mail client, waiting for it to pull down the message that may-or-may-not have arrived at my mail host yet, when it's incredibly easy to use a password manager for everything without having to leave my browser. He bemoans the number of controls you need to interact with to log in, but to get to log in with his method, I need to put in my email address (or take the time to find it in the list), interact with whatever control submits the form, switch to my email client (at least 1 control, probably more), refresh it to get the most recent messages (perhaps more than once), open the message, click the link, go back and close the window I used to start the login process in the first place, then switch back to the window with the app in it. Seems far more complex.

I don't buy his premise, either; he claims you need to interact with "6 different controls" to log in to Facebook, but (a) you only interact with 4 of them and (b) that's only the first time you log in from that computer. He's trying to solve a problem I have never experienced. I'm curious to see if others have felt overwhelmed by the number of controls on login forms; this is a problem I've never had.

Sending link to e-mail is exactly as dependent on third party as OAuth.

Non-power users (11 yo kids) maybe don't always have their inbox open/session active.

Best case scenario with one e-mail entry for multiple devices stand in conflict with link only being usable once.

Don't get me wrong, I think passwords are horrible but this post was just made in too much of a hurry.

Interesting topic!

I personally think this could work. The big show stopper occurs on a shared computer. It would be annoying to get logged out of a service daily and have to request a new email link to log back in.

Someone needs a history of internet mail. It was never designed to operate in real time or be fast, whereas people expect logins to be fairly quick.

Also, using an email backchannel and one time keys moves the security from an encrypted connection (assuming SSL) to an unencrypted SMTP connection anyone can view...

Back in the good old days of UUCP you might wait a day or two to get mail from across the globe...

Here's an idea, if you allow me to choose From a list of users, then I'll continuously "spam" other users' inboxes with login link messages.

We could suggest that Facebook implement something like this. Seeing a login control containing 950MM names would be rather comical.