Yes, have a look at PayPal Instant Payment Notifications to receive a server-to-server notification from PayPal which you can subsequently verify and use to update your database / send out your custom email.
IPN works as follows:
You create the PayPal and incude a "notify_url". The value for this parameter will be the full URL to a script on your server, called the 'IPN script' or 'IPN handler'.
You can specify an IPN handler as follows for Website Payments Standard
<input type="hidden" name="notify_url" value="http://yourdomain.com/ipn.php
For Express Checkout or Website Payments Pro, simply include the following in your SetExpressCheckout/DoExpressCheckoutPayment or DoDirectPayment API call respectively. NOTIFYURL=http://yourdomain.com/ipn.php
Next:
A buyer completes a transaction via PayPal
Once the buyer completes the transaction, he/she may close the browser, or return to your website. It doesn't matter.
Once the transaction is accepted and processed by PayPal, PayPal will send out a notification to http://yourdomain.com/ipn.php
You need to take all POST data that was sent to this script, and POST it back to https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_notify-validate
If the data you send back matches the data PayPal sent you, a 'VERIFIED' response is returned.
If the response is VERIFIED, it's at this point that you would look up the matching transaction/buyer on your end, and update the phpBB thread status appropriately.
Some sample code and documentation for PayPal IPN is available at https://www.paypal.com/ipn/ In addition, some tips on making a secure IPN script are available at https://www.x.com/developers/community/blogs/ppmtsrobertg/securing-your-instant-payment-notification-ipn-script
Note: If you want to include any custom data along with the transaction which you can read out later, use 'custom'. <input type="hidden" name="custom" value="xxxxx"> This will also be returned in the IPN POST data sent from PayPal.
Should you run into any issues while implementing IPN, support is available via https://www.paypal.com/mts/
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