IE 6.0 and cookies

[Anon]

I've got a site that uses cookies to store login information in an admin area for users. Occasionally, a user's browser doesn't seem to store their session information and keeps getting bumped back to the login page.

These users are always using IE 6.

Has anyone else noticed problems with IE 6.0 and php cookies?

I've looked around on google and phpbuilder, and can't seem to find more than a mention of this problem. Here's how I'm setting the cookies:

// if valid, set cookie (session only).
setcookie ("loginemail", $loginemail,time()+86430); / expire in 30 days /
setcookie ("loginpassword", $loginpassword);

[Anon]

I find that if I set the time variable (always in quotes) it works better for IE. Except for IE 5.0, for which it seems you also need to set the path and domain variables for it to work consistently. I use a browser detection class to help me out with setting cookies properly for different browsers.

As a side note, I think there a probably some security issues with using the "loginpassword" as the token, especially if you aren't using ssl for every page. A common approach is to generate random session numbers or some sort of hash and use that as the cookie. Then set up a small table that matches user ids to the session ids. You also probably will want to auto-datestamp that field so that you can clear out old sessions after a reasonable time.

Lacey