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.