Hi Dave,

As far as I can see, sessions per se would not work, because:

- These URL's are typically sent in email messages (so the session is not initiated by logging into a site)
- There is no one-to-one mapping from users to sessions (the same URL may be sent to many users, and users are not required to authenticate on the site)

In an general sense, I suppose it would be possible to set up a persistent hash where the key is a unique ID and the value is the parameters. When generating the email, the parameters would be stripped off the URL, and stored in the hash against a new unique key. The key would then be added to the URL. When the CGI is run, it would look up the values against the key.

My objection to this is it's not possible to tell when a given hash entry can be safely deleted.

regards,

-- Michael Snell
-- michael@snell.com

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