I got a call today about one of my applications not running correctly from inside an iFrame. I tried it out and it looked like everything worked great in Safari and Firefox but not IE6 or IE7. It took me a few failed attempts to fix it before I decided it must be a session problem. After firing up a packet sniffer it became obvious the cookie with the session ID was not being passed.

The problem lies with a W3C standard called Platform for Privacy Preferences or P3P for short. You can read all about the boring stuff via the link or else just install the P3P Compact Policy header below. This will allow Internet Explorer to accept your third-party cookie. You will need to send the header on every page that sets a cookie.

PHP:

header('P3P:CP="IDC DSP COR ADM DEVi TAIi PSA PSD IVAi IVDi CONi HIS OUR IND CNT"');

ASP.NET:

HttpContext.Current.Response.AddHeader("p3p","CP=\"IDC DSP COR ADM DEVi TAIi PSA PSD IVAi IVDi CONi HIS OUR IND CNT\"");

Django:

response = render_to_response('mytemplate.html')
response["P3P"] = 'CP="IDC DSP COR ADM DEVi TAIi PSA PSD IVAi IVDi CONi HIS OUR IND CNT"'

JSP:

response.addHeader("P3P","CP=\"IDC DSP COR ADM DEVi TAIi PSA PSD IVAi IVDi CONi HIS OUR IND CNT\"")