What's the goal here? If you want to make sure that spambots can't harvest that email address, you don't want to do Base64 on it as that's not encryption and since it doesn't require a key to decode, you really haven't protected anything.
Can you tackle it a different way than exposing the email address? Is there a different unique identifier you can use? You wouldn't need to jump through the hoops with encryption/decryption to keep the address safe. -- Howard Fore, [email protected] "The universe tends toward maximum irony. Don't push it." - Jeff Atwood On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 10:42 AM, Clarke Bishop <[email protected]>wrote: > I am building an eMail unsubscribe function, and I thought it would be a > good idea to encrypt the eMail address. In the email, I set the unsubscribe > link to: > > > > unsubscribe.cfm?id= l5N6axdBQlGDpyAklnmkjP+mfaauBKvfS9G9RzUQRJI= > > > > But, this string isn’t URLEncoded, so I encoded it like this: > > > > unsubscribe.cfm?id=l5N6axdBQlGDpyAklnmkjP%2BmfaauBKvfS9G9RzUQRJI%3D > > > > But, I’ve still got a problem because when I URLDecode the parameter, it > alters the string. > > > > Instead of: l5N6axdBQlGDpyAklnmkjP+mfaauBKvfS9G9RzUQRJI= > > > > I get: l5N6axdBQlGDpyAklnmkjP mfaauBKvfS9G9RzUQRJI= > > > > It’s changing the “+” to a space. As a result, my decrypt fails. > > > > My question is: *What’s the best way to generally handle this requirement? > * I know I could just replace the space with a “+”, but I’m expecting > there may be other characters that don’t get handled correctly. And, I don’t > want to get a bunch of unexpected errors. > > > > I’m using ColdFusion 8 and doing the encrypt like this: > encrypt(ARGUMENTS.data, > variables.theKey, "DESEDE", "Base64") > > > > Is there a better encryption or encoding to use? Or, is there a better way > to use URLEncode and URLDecode? > > > > Thanks for any ideas! > > > > Clarke > > ------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe from this list, manage your profile @ > http://www.acfug.org?fa=login.edituserform > > For more info, see http://www.acfug.org/mailinglists > Archive @ http://www.mail-archive.com/discussion%40acfug.org/ > List hosted by FusionLink <http://www.fusionlink.com> > -------------------------------------------------------------
