Unable to read online mails

[satimis]

Hi folks,


Some companies, including mine, disable the cookies on browser (I suppose) making their staffs unable to send/receive online mails other than their own. I even can't read webmails on my own server. I tried going through other proxy servers but without result. Is there anyway to breakthrough this barrier? TIA


B.R.
satimis

[ph34r]

Hrm... my cookies file has been read-only for years w/ nothing in it... and I can do webmail fine (squirrelmail on my domain, college webmail here at work, hotmail, yahoo, gmail, etc...)

[bwkaz]

ph34r -- whether it works with your cookie file read-only or not would depend on what the server uses for authentication. If it uses any kind of HTTP authentication (e.g. Basic, Digest, or anything else where the browser prompts the user itself), then cookies are not required. But if it uses a web form to authenticate the user, then cookies are required -- otherwise the user will just keep getting redirected to the login page, because a successful login is recorded in a cookie's value.

Also, even if the cookie file is read-only, session cookies can still be accepted, so some web-form-login webmail setups will work in that case as well. But they won't work if cookies are completely disabled.

satimis -- One option would be to change the webmail server to use HTTP authentication (and keep it over SSL), instead of redirecting you to a login form.

However: Are you absolutely sure you want to do this? At work, we block everyone from known webmail sites, because their personal mail (on the webmail server) does not go through the same virus scanning / attachment filtering / whatever that our internal mail goes through. Allowing them access to it means that even if we successfully protect against whatever the random Windows worm-of-the-week is on our own mail server, the users could simply go look at a webmail interface and still get infected. NOT a good idea.

(In other words: Generally policies are there for a good reason...)

Plus, the computer you use at work isn't yours -- it's your company's. If they want to prevent you from getting to certain sites (or types of sites, or whatever), then that's well within their rights.