Reminder: Upcoming change to the Portier public broker May 11th

[Stéphan Kochen]

Dear Portier community,

[This mail is a reminder of the notification sent out last week, about an important change to the Portier public broker.]

On Monday May 11th 2020, we will update the public broker on broker.portier.io with an important change that may affect both sites using the public broker and their users. This is the second and last notification about this change.

Previously, the broker allowed an Identity Provider (IdP) to perform additional normalization on the email address. This turned out to be confusing as well as problematic if an IdP changed its implementation, causing user logins to suddenly become invalid.

Portier now disallows any additional normalization performed by IdPs, and instead only applies the basic steps outlined in our email normalization specification [1]. The outcome of these steps is always consistent, regardless of IdP changes.

As a result of these changes, user identifiers may change when we upgrade the public broker on May 11th. This especially affects users of GMail with dots in their email addresses. As an example, a user who logs in as `John...@gmail.com` would previously be assigned an identifier `joh...@gmail.com`, but will now be assigned `john...@gmail.com`.

These changes should not affect your code, but please check if your client libraries are up-to-date. If you are a library author we’d really appreciate if you checked your implementation against the latest protocol specification [2].

If you’d like to test your code against the new broker version before May 11th, we’ve prepared a staging environment available now at the following URLs:

- Broker: https://broker.staging.portier.io
- Demo: https://demo.staging.portier.io

Regards,
— Stéphan

[1]: https://github.com/portier/portier.github.io/blob/master/specs/Email-Normalization.md
[2]: https://github.com/portier/portier.github.io/blob/master/specs/Portier-Protocol.md