paypal ipn email

[pinbrook]

A client of ours has recieved the following email from paypal - unsolicited. He says paypal is working fine and all callbacks work too, on investigating the email headers it does not seem to be spam

Please check your server that handles PayPal Instant Payment Notifications (IPN). Instant Payment Notifications sent to the following URL(s) are failing:

http://www.xxx.xxx/cgi-bin/os000001....POSTPROCESS=1&

If you do not recognize this URL, you may be using a service provider that is using IPN on your behalf. Please contact your service provider with the above information. If this problem continues, IPNs may be disabled for your account.

Anyone else seen this? What does it mean?

[gpzzone]

Jo

This is a massive problem, and certainly not spam nor is it confined to Actinic, I have been researchiing it for 6-8 weeks now with the help of Vbulletin developers, and Host-it tech support.

Paypal will turn off the IPN facility after a set number of failed transactions, once they do this, then Actinic orders will not be promoted to orders, and will remain in the pending system. The danger being that they will be overlooked - I check mine twice daily - I really do not trust Paypal one inch at the moment.

There are numerous other topics on this forum regarding this, but frankly I don't know who is responsible for this.

The Paypal server receives a 503 error response, but no-one knows why?

You can read how big a problem it is in the Vbulletin community here. There are pages of it!

If anyone has any ideas please share them.

I would be very interested to hear if your client is running a VBulletin board with paid subscriptions enabled, and if it is accessing the same Paypal account as their Actinic catalogue.

[pinbrook]

Craig, very interesting reading... not sure what happens next.

For info my client sire is actinic only - with no vbulletin

[TJWM]

We too have been receiving these e-mails from Paypal for a site that was working perfectly. One week ago they finally turned the IPN for the site and now the order does not automatically reconcile which is now a pain.

[magicalwonders]

Yeah, I got the same message from Paypal today!
I knew something hasn't been working quite right as all recent orders have been going into "Pending payment service Provider". I'm not using vbulletin either.

Whatever is going on it seems to be affecting quite a few people.

Myles

[magicalwonders]

Hi Folks,

It looks like a lot of people are having a problem with this issue. I tracked down this thread on Paypal community forum - https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/...ing/td-p/28716

I decided to disable the IPN in my paypal account and discovered that because the notification URL was blank it wouldn't let me. I received the following error message -

You must enter a properly formatted URL into the Notification URL field in order to activate or deactivate Instant Payment Notification.

I know that when I first set up IPN to work with Actinic I just left the notification URL blank. It didn't cause the above error, and everything worked properly. I have been able to deactivate it now by entering my domain url. However, I am unable to reactivate IPN as I have no idea what the correct url should be in order to work with Actinic. Just entering my domain address causes IPN to fail.

It would seem that something has changed on the Paypal side in the way that IPN works that is causing the issue.

Myles

[Buzby]

I am having the same issues as above.

Can anyone confirm the address that should be included as the IPN return address?

Many thanks

[pinbrook]

It might be worth contacting support, they are aware of the issue and have been asking for server logs in order to diagnose.

[Mick Jackson]

This topic seems to have gone quiet.

Is there any news of a solution on the horizon.

[gpzzone]

This topic seems to have gone quiet.

Is there any news of a solution on the horizon.

No is the honest answer. It is affecting hundreds if not thousands of users that rely upon the Paypal IPN system. Paypal are frankly useless, it's almost certainly an issue with them rather than other software programmes, Actinic etc, but getting them to acknowledge it is impossible.

So, we are where we are - at their mercy.....and it's cheesing me right off.