The invention relates to methods for managing state information associated
with user agents in systems utilizing the wireless application protocol.
According to the invention, the user agent indicates in the header
information of a WAP message such as a request to the cookie proxy that
the user agent currently has a session having associated state
information, when the user agent has received header information
indicating the presence of a cookie during the current session. This
informs the cookie proxy that it should continue storing the cookies
associated with the current session. When the cookie proxy receives for
the next time a WAP message without such indication, it can assume that a
new session has started, in which case the cookie proxy can discard all
cookies bound to the previous session unless certain parameters of
certain cookies explicitly indicate that they should not be discarded at
that moment. Further, in an advantageous embodiment of the invention, the
cookie proxy can indicate to the user agent that it has no cookies
associated with the current session. The invention allows the
synchronization of the user agent and the cookie proxy.