IPN Not Sending payer_email Field For eBay Transactions

Tim76
Contributor
Contributor

As title. Stopped working today (29th March). The payer_email field is not being sent for eBay transactions, though still works for purchases made from my website (i.e. were the payment has been made on the PayPal website).

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Tim76
Contributor
Contributor

@bnctech Getting someone started with the eBay API is a lot of work. You'll need to do an internet search. Unless you're already using the API, or you're looking for a challenge, I would give PayPal some time to fix this. I don't believe this is intended. My IPN listener has a few lines of code where it copes with PayPal missing values and/or renaming values. Without resorting to casual insults, and from the perspective of someone who used to design and write financial code for a living, PayPal's quality of coder and/or quality control are not impressive.

 

If you can't wait, or PayPal don't restart sending the email address soon, you have three possible solutions:

  1. Learn the eBay API, and use it to fetch eBay's email address for the customer (which may be different to PayPal's email address);
  2. Have a script run periodically to match up any missing email addresses with PayPal payment notifications. The buyer's email address is given in the Reply To field of the email. Shouldn't take too long for someone with coding skills and at least a basic knowledge of POP. Has the advantage over the eBay API that it will be PayPal email address you're fetching. Has the disadvantage that it really is a bit of a hack.
  3. Just create a way (CLI/webpage/whatever) to manually insert the email address into your database, and send any order confirmation emails at that point of the process. As mentioned in 2, the email address can be taken from PayPal's payment notification email. Probably the easiest to implement for those not already using eBay API, but does require manual intervention.
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SlickTrick
Contributor
Contributor

Hi,

Same with me 29/3/19 no email addresses coming through via the IPN.

Does anyone know if PP are aware and dealing with this matter to resolve it please?

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LeeM53
Contributor
Contributor

Same here, not worked since 29th.

Works OK through my website but not for Ebay transactions so automated sending of receipts to the customer no longer works.

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Kraks
Contributor
Contributor

Same issue here 😞

That's very weird that paypal removed this field without any notice. It simply broke my application and for few hours I was not able to process orders.

In my opinion paypal should notify users that they will remove this field... Many of us were depending on it.

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SlickTrick
Contributor
Contributor

Here Her Kraks totally agree there should be some list of what values are going to change or depreciate. The API still shows it as valid: https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/ipn/integration-guide/IPNandPDTVariables/#ipn-transaction-...

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Joe688
Contributor
Contributor

PayPal status page says reporting is in Service Disruption status. Don't know if it's related:

https://www.paypal-status.com/product/production

 

Has anyone tried using PayPal's API gettransactionDetails instead of eBay API to obtain payer_email for the eBay payments?

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SlickTrick
Contributor
Contributor

This relates to:

 

 

Some Impact to Reporting (PP-LIVE-8726)
Incident Start: Mar 18, 07:00 UTCIncident End: On-going
AFFECTED PRODUCTS:
  • Reporting
Update 1: We continue to work towards a resolution and will provide an update when we have more information.
Apr 2, 15:51 UTC
Initial Notification: We're experiencing a system issue that's intermittently affecting all reports under the Statements menu. If you're experiencing this issue, please try refreshing the page. We apologize for the inconvenience and are working towards resolving this issue.
Mar 28, 17:46 UTC
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SlickTrick
Contributor
Contributor

Looks like it is back and working as of sometime yesterday as I am now getting IPN's with the payer_email value populated. Is everyone else in the same position? If not let me know and I may be able to help resolve.

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JasonDuncan
Contributor
Contributor

payer_email populating for me too now

 

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SlickTrick
Contributor
Contributor

Can anyone tel me which of these two curl values they are using when the payer_email was not being received please? 

 

$ch = curl_init('https://ipnpb.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr'); or $ch = curl_init('https://ipnpb.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr'); 

 

I have a ticket open with MTS and trying to identify what caused the problem.

 

Thank you.

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