IPN listener getting status other than VERIFIED or INVALID

paulatthehug
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According to the documention when our listener verifies an IPN PayPal should return either 'VERIFIED' or 'INVALID' however we've had a number of instances over the last few days where we've had gibberish back instead, although it's clear from the account that the IPN was valid (so we should have received 'VERIFIED' back).

 

It took me a while to add sufficient debug to catch it at it but on the two most recent occasions it returned this string each time:

 

  ‹        TŽK ‚0 „ïüŠ•», M <Œ$¨ÄÔ Çb›@‚ ûÐøïmáäe’Ùùvgɦ¸æ¬mJ8±s Í=«« â-bU²#bÁŠ5Ù')by‰iDzû )é% ÞØÁŽ’ Ò 2.à&_N Kp G  ŒtJ|ÃæŽþQÞGd¦­r :­>Fj0r²ÀA¯ Øž  Œ ôÛç åF “²à&!*±|  é4`¨›*,mþzø3ú   ÿÿ  Î[ óâ

(I've had to put a "*" in to replace a couple of symbols which the forum didn't like for some reason.)

This has only started happening over the last week and we've not touched the code in our IPN listener is quite a long time so it seems to be something on PayPal's side.

 

Any suggestions as to how to handle this? As it seems to be very intermittent I'm wondering about simply automatically re-submitting the API request until I get either 'VERIFIED' or 'INVALID' or invalid back (with a loop count to stop me sitting there forever banging my head against PayPal's brick wall) but that seemed like a horrible cludge.

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filipporonco
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It's thrilling 😄
Keep waiting for an happy ending.

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41 REPLIES 41

filipporonco
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We have the same identical issue since almost 1 week.
The most part of the IPNs are ok but almost 15-20% are affected.
The only thing I've noticed - say this for some of the paypal team if someone is reading - is that in those IPN affected by the problem some "set-cookies" lines are missing while in those that are ok we have all the lines.

It seems some malformed text at the bottom of those invalid IPNs or something like a non binay sign at the bottom, can't say, this is surely on Paypal side.

If you need more details we're here to give an help.

We opened a support ticket on July 2nd but at the moment we had no answer at all. Please keep us informed if you get some kind of feedback from paypal. This is very urgent because it forces us to veryfy all the things manually while we get FAIL on verification for GOOD IPNs.

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paulatthehug
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Ah, it's not just us then. Good.

 

I have also raised this with PayPal via a DM to the AskPayPal Twitter account linking to this page and they've replied thus "To best address your concern, I will ask a Specialist to check things out and reply to you here as soon as possible. Your patience is appreciated as messages are worked in the order they are received. Thank you for your patience."

 

I'll report back if and when I receive a reply.

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paulatthehug
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Contributor

Ah, it's not just us then. Good.

 

I have also raised this with PayPal via a DM to the AskPayPal Twitter account linking to this page and they've replied thus "To best address your concern, I will ask a Specialist to check things out and reply to you here as soon as possible. Your patience is appreciated as messages are worked in the order they are received. Thank you for your patience."

 

I'll report back if and when I receive a reply.

 

P.S. this forum software sucks 😞

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filipporonco
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Just done the same, the first who get a feedback, please share here.
It must be a broad issue. Just to give some more details, we get this both on preapprovals IPNs and on chained payments IPNs generated through the adaptive payments API.

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filipporonco
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Looking to the malformed text, it seems very very similat to the string (should say identical but I've not checked char by char, just the start and the end) that we get at the bottom of our malformed IPNs, this could make think that it is a sort of malformed "sign" at the bottom of the IPN, the VERIFIED or INVALID part of the IPN that for some reason turns out that odd way.

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paulatthehug
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And we've just had another one, the second today, so two out of sixteen IPNs. This is not good.

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paulatthehug
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And another one!

 

Right, this is getting out of hand so for now we're going to put in a tweak to accept any response except "INVALID" as being a good response as otherwise our customers are going to be really **bleep** off.

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filipporonco
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Hi Paul,

 

any update from paypal on your side?
We're still waiting for support to our ticket, just received an interlocutory answer where they say that are investigating on the issue but no solutions at the moment.

JUst to add some feedback from our side, we've just processed 36 payments, got 35 correct IPNs and 1 malformed one. It seems the rate of the malformed IPNs is lower than in the previous days or maybe it is just rondomic. At the moment we continue to check each single payments / IPN manually, very stressing.

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paulatthehug
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Nothing from PayPal, via any of the routes, however since we added that bodge three days ago to accept any response except "INVALID" as being a good response we've received 88 IPNs all with a status of "VERIFIED". We've not had a single malformed one. So perhaps it's been fixed ...

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