IPN emails with download links stop if 4 or more items in cart

[davemacguitar]

Curious IPN email behavior.

What I thought was an intermittent error leading me in all manner of IPN alleyways has turned out to be a systematic error.

I am live testing my store and through extensive trial and error noticed that if I have 4 or more items bought at checkout this disrupts the sending of the IPN emails to seller and buyer so that download links aren’t received in email while perfect on the Thankyou page.

All paypal receipts are in order.

A grid of the results

# items bought, IPN seller email, IPN buyer email

buy 1 download ,yes,yes

buy 2 download ,yes,yes

buy 3 download ,yes,yes

buy 4 download ,no,no

buy 4 non download ,no,yes (is there a clue here as buyer but not seller get IPN email for non downloadable item?)

buy >4 any item combination ,no,no

But it gets weirder. If I start my shopping session with MORE than 4 items (lets say 11 MP3 singles), and then keep returning to the store buying incrementally less items (10 then 9 then 8 items etc) , I won’t receive any IPN notification emails until I get to purchase just 1 item. (?!) That seems to reset something and the original described problem repeats.

I would include the ipn_handle_debug.log but I can’t for the life of me get eStore to write to it (debug reset, file & folder permissions good, debugger check on), however the paypal.php file has what looks like viable code in it.

What I thought was an intermittent error leading me in all manner of IPN alleyways has turned out to be a systematic error.

Has anyone else experienced such a thing?

With thanks, Dave

[amin007]

1) There is some issue with your server configuration because a plugin should be able to write to a text file with 644 permission. You can temporarily change the permission of these debug log files to 777. Its not ideal but it doesn’t matter if the log file has loose permission for a short period of time. At least this will let you see the debug.

2) Now reset the debug file from the settings menu

4) add 4 items to the cart and do a checkout.

5) Share the content of the “ipn_handle_debug.log” file.

This should give use clues as to what is going on.

[davemacguitar]

Thank you Key Master.

You are spot on, increasing permission to 777 for ipn_handle_debug.log restores correct IPN email behavour. All IPN email fulfillments are as they should be regardless of number of items in cart.

Nothing but SUCCESS throughout now-written-to ipn_handle_debug.log file.

I couldn’t be happier.

Many thanks and respect

Dave

ps. what are the security ramifications of having a 777 .log file in my wordpress directory, it leaves me feeling a little uneasy?

[amin007]

Now that you know that the system is working fine you don’t need debug anymore. So you can turn off debug from the settings menu. This will make it so the plugin won’t try to write to the debug file anymore which means you can delete the log files or set their permission to 644 and there shouldn’t be any issue. Ideally you want to fix the issue on the server side but I know that many hosting companies are not very cooperative.

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