Email verifacation

[Amir Ghezelbash]

Hello every body I had a question

I am involved in a project where I need to verify the user's email
address by sending them an email and asking them to click on a link. now
I have done this but my link is human readable(exampl e
validator.aspx? address="bl**@b lah.com") so any user can just type in
their email address into that link and it will validate it for them...
now what I want to do is to encrypt this email but most of the
encryption methods that I have searched into end up giving me a very
long strings but most professional websites that I have seen have done
this but they use a very short encrypted string.. can somebody give me
some hints on how to go about this...what is the best most professional
method to use?

btw i am coding this in asp.net 2.0 C#
thank you in advance

Awaiting your responds
---
Best Regards
Amir

*** Sent via Developersdex http://www.developersdex.com ***

[Phillip Ian]

Seems like you're going to want to be careful of having special
characters in that string. =, /, etc...they could confuse the URL
parser in the web server.

When I did the same thing, I used a GUID and stripped the dashes out to
be safe.

[Mythran]

"Phillip Ian" <ph****@comcast .net> wrote in message
news:11******** **************@ o13g2000cwo.goo glegroups.com.. .

Seems like you're going to want to be careful of having special
characters in that string. =, /, etc...they could confuse the URL
parser in the web server.

When I did the same thing, I used a GUID and stripped the dashes out to
be safe.

Aye, you should use the URLEncode method to encode special characters :)

HTH,
Mythran

[Sean M]

The concern with querystrings it that the server can modify them from
underneath you since certain characters have special interpretations within
a URL. This can cause problems for algorithms like Base64-encoding

Here's some brief pseudo-code to save grief:

// encoding the string
string blah = "TEST";
Crypter crypt = new Crypter(); // not a real object -- implementation of
this is left to you
string encryptedBlah = Server.UrlEncod e(crypt.Encrypt (string));

// decoding the string
Crypter crypt = new Crypter();
string decryptedBlah =
crypt.Decrypt(S erver.UrlDecode (Request.QueryS tring["blah"]).Replace("
","+"));
"Phillip Ian" <ph****@comcast .net> wrote in message
news:11******** **************@ o13g2000cwo.goo glegroups.com.. .

Seems like you're going to want to be careful of having special
characters in that string. =, /, etc...they could confuse the URL
parser in the web server.

When I did the same thing, I used a GUID and stripped the dashes out to
be safe.