treated as valid user activity and the session timeout period for the user may be reset acts 702 and 703 for example if the session timeout period is set so that a client is automatically logged out after ten minutes and there has currently been five minutes of no activity the session timeout period may be reset so that there will be ten more minutes remaining until the client is automatically logged out on the other hand when a context variable is located act 702 the timeout period is not reset and the timeout period may continue to run act 704 additionally the context variable may be removed from the url act 705 ssl vpn gateway 320 may interpret the request and access an appropriate back end server 306 to satisfy the request act 706 for example in the request shown in fig6 ssl vpn gateway 320 may query a corporate email program for new email messages ssl vpn gateway 320 may receive a response from the accessed back end server 306 and forward the response to client device 308 act 707 if needed the response may be reformatted for client device 308 such as by reformatting information from a non web application such as a mail server into a format that can be sent in html format to client device 308 as described above an ssl vpn gateway provides security and accessibility features of existing ssl vpn gateways and additionally includes the ability to intelligently determine when to treat user requests as genuine user requests that reset the session timeout period with this feature an ssl vpn gateway can enhance session.