Email Verification Protocol

Category: Miscellaneous
Type: New or changed feature
Status: Proposed (Chrome Proposed)
Intent stage: None

Summary

The EVP (email verification protocol) helps users create, access and recover accounts by providing cryptographic proof of ownership seamlessly rather than email OTPs manually.

Motivation

Verifying email addresses on the web today involves receiving magic link and proving that you have access to the email inbox. This is cumbersome for users and inefficient for developers: emails can take a while to arrive, can get into SPAM folders and users have to switch applications to verify them.

Standards & signals

Specification: https://dickhardt.github.io/email-verification/draft-hardt-email-verification.html
Firefox: Defer — We filed for an early review before we had all of the information for Mozilla to make a proper assessment. We think we understand better the proposal now than we did 6 months ago, so we are planning to re-open the standard position request and try to offer clarity that was lacking.
Safari: No signal — We haven't formally gotten a review from Webkit, but we got some informal feedback last TPAC with their preference to augment WebOTP / one-time-codes and OTPs. We believe this alternative isn't necessarily mutually exclusive and can work symbiotically with what's being proposed. We expanded on that here: https://github.com/samuelgoto/email-verification-protocol#webotp-otps-vs-evts-and-imap
Web developers: Positive — This API requires participation by websites and email providers. We successfully ran a devtrial with a few partners which we expect will join us running an original trial. Based on what we heard so far, we are optimistic this will hit a sweet spot with website authors, but that we'd like to gather further evidence of developer demand and API fitness in an actual production setup.

Docs: https://code.sgo.to/2024/10/25/verified-email-autocomplete.html

Samples: https://code.sgo.to/2024/10/25/verified-email-autocomplete.html

Explainers: https://github.com/samuelgoto/email-verification-protocol

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