Recently I discovered a couple of CCBill powered sponsors have added one or more RSS feeds to their site tour. To fully evaluate just how damaging this traffic leak is one needs to know how long they have set the CCBill cookie for. The longer the cookie is set for, the less damaging the feed is. The same holds true for mailing lists.
The CCBill cookie is set, by default, to expire in 3 days. However, each sponsor has the option of easily changing it to any number of days between 1 and 255. While the sponsor may or may not state what their cookie setting is, it can not be determined or verified by asking CCBill…they won’t tell you. Thus, the only way to check this is to read the cookie yourself.
After doing some research, I was able to accurately determine the expiration date of CCBill cookies written in Firefox, but never could get it nailed down with EI 6. Then I thought there must be utilities out there that will do this for you, and there are!
FIREFOX
View Cookies CS is a Firefox add-on that will, among other things tell you what the cookie’s expiration date is. If more than one CCBill cookie has been written, the 6 digit number in the name column is the CCBill sponsor’s ID number also found in the referring URL.
INTERNET EXPLORER
NirSoft’s IECookiesView is a free utility that will, among other things, tell you what the expiration date is for any cookie written in IE. Again, if you have more than one CCBill cookie, you can identify the sponsor by reading the 6 digit sponsor ID number in the “key” column.
With these tools you can quickly determine how bad a mailing list or RSS feed leak is in a CCBill powered sponsor’s site. How long do you think the sponsor is going to hold onto your surfers before making the sale from a mailing list of RSS feed? I think it’s safe to say more than 3 days.