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Asked: 2026-05-25T18:52:32+00:00

I’m looking to send a user a link if they forget their password. I

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I’m looking to send a user a link if they forget their password.

I have it that they enter their email address and an email is sent to them with a link to reset their password – although I want this link to expire in two days.

Looking at a password reset email I got sent from an online store, I was looking to keep it generally the same format, but I’m unclear how the the expiry part of the URL is created.

The example URL I got sent is:

http://www.mydomain.com/reset.aspx?expires=1317124368&passwordreset=1&username=thegunner%40yahoo.com&authCode=dfb83e3074d395a7606bdc1825d709197fa984ab

passwordreset=1 …ok no prob
username = email address …no prob
authcode …I guess I could just generate GUID code.

expires=1317124368 …how could this part be created? I guess it’s a time stamp in some format of the day the email was sent – how could I recreate this?

Any ideas?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The expires in that URL may very well be the id of the record in the table that actually holds the date and time when the link expires.

    You could do the same: send the link via email and store in a table the link, the date and time when it expires plus an identity column (autogenerated), and possibly some other information (email, etc).

    When the person clicks on your link, you use that ID to get the expiration date and time to determine whether the person is allowed to use the same link or not.

    Or… that number may represent a date and time measured in milliseconds, ticks, nanoseconds,etc, counting from a specific date and time.

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