I recently set up an account and everything was working fine until this morning. I was in the account, but distracted for a while with a phone conversation, during which the site timed me out. When I tried to log back in I was denied with this message:

Session Cookies Required

Your browser does not support session cookies. Please enable support for session cookies and try again.

I've looked through Safari Preferences and cannot find anything that would allow me to enable session cookies.

Safari most certainly does support session cookies...by default...no pref involved.

I wonder if your site is referring to one or both of the "Prevent cross-site tracking" and "Ask websites not to track me" prefs?

If so, I'd scratch it off of my list.

"Prevent cross-site tracking" was checked, so I unchecked it. "Ask websites not to track me" was not checked, so I left it as is. After a restart, nothing changed.

Then I also unchecked "Enable content blockers" under "Settings for this website" but, again after a restart, nothing changed. I'll send them a note.

I've restored all setting to the defaults. This is a hospital health portal so they will be very particular about security. I wonder if their system has made a decision based on the fact that there was a timed out event? I'll send them a note.

I don't know if it's pertinent in this instance, but unchecking "Enable..." does NOT disable Ghostery; it's got to be toggled from its own pane.

Assuming that that site did, indeed, place a cookie, try deleting it and logging in again. You could also empty the Safari cache (option -command-E), but you may have to quite Safari afterwards and relaunch it.

Which makes me wonder... "Could my Cookie software be the culprit?". The site would place a cookie but Cookie would delete it after each session (I had not yet set the site up as a "Favourite"). Maybe that indicated non-support to the health site.

Issue resolved....

It seems to have been connected to the address saved as a bookmark. I redid the bookmark, eliminating a bunch of stuff after .ca, and the site no longer sends out the session cookie message.

Thanks, artie and Jon, for your ideas.

Just to clarify, Cookie is unable to touch session cookies; they're deleted automatically by Safari when it's quit.

Aah, hence the term "session" cookies....the penny drops.