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Making Cookies Work in IE

Posted October 12, 2004 – 4:19 pm by Yakov Shafranovich in Programming

Recently I had a weird problem while using Tomcat - sessions would get lost when using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Since Tomcat stores the session id as JSESSIONID cookie, the session would get lost when the cookie is not stored. Same behavior occurs with other web servers including IIS and Resin.

After further research, it seems that IE does not store cookies at default privacy settings unless a P3P policy is provided for the site. In order to bypass this problem, a basic P3P policy needs to defined and included in the site. I used IBM’s P3P editor to generate a basic P3P XML policy file and the following snippet of HTML code to enable it: