APEX

Up until now the session cookie allowed us to figure out if the user already had a session and redirect them to the page they wanted using that session (via a page process on the login page). Just testing APEX 4.1 and it seems that this quick hack is not going to work any more because:
a. The session cookie has been replaced by the time the login page loads
b. The login page gives no clues as to the destination the user actually wanted (used to be able to check OWA_UTIL.GET_CGI_ENV('QUERY_STRING') to see what the URL looked like, but now the URL is just the login page)

The problem I'm trying to solve is for a job logging system where users get lots of notifications via email. With the standard behaviour of APEX, they would have to login every time they click a link in an email. Given that this is pretty non-standard behaviour for any other web application I've used, has any one got any ideas for how to get APEX to stop killing sessions by overriding the cookie everytime it sees a URL it doesn't like? Have tried using session 0, but still it clobbers my cookie.