Will you stop making money tomorrow?
In an email dated 1th November 2012 they wrote this:
In a bulletin dated October 18, 2011, we announced that we were going to expand the number of IP addresses for www.paypal.com to improve our site's performance, scalability and availability. As part of this transition, we planned to discontinue support for the HTTP 1.0 protocol starting February 1, 2013. We have recently identified that this change may impact the ability of some of our merchants to perform IPN (Instant Payment Notification) post-back validation or PDT (Payment Data Transfer) posts to www.paypal.com. This happens when the IPN or PDT scripts use the HTTP 1.0 protocol and do not include the "Host: www.paypal.com" header in the HTTP request. Additional Details Starting February 1, 2013, we will require all incoming requests to have a "Host" header which complies with HTTP 1.1 Specifications. This header was not required under HTTP 1.0. IPN and PDT scripts using HTTP 1.0 may start failing with "HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request" errors after February 1, 2013, which will result in IPN messages not being validated successfully, or PDT scripts not being able to retrieve transaction information. Your Action Required before February 1, 2013 You will need to update your IPN and/or PDT scripts to use HTTP 1.1, and include the "Host: www.paypal.com" and "Connection: close" HTTP headers in the IPN and PDT scripts. |
Cutting through the tech talk, it seems they are saying that many membership sites, shopping carts and other types of sites that rely on the PayPal IPN will stop working correctly because they will no longer be able to communicate with PayPal.
I only found out about the problem and its potential to mess up my business because the support team at Kim Standerline's EasyMemberPro sent out a message to their customers a few days ago explaining how to update the program so that it will deal with the new IPN code. It is basically a reinstall of the software using the latest version (they provided a link and instructions).
None of the other programs I use to run sites that take PayPal payments have, to my knowledge, sent out any support messages. At least if they have they haven't reached me. I know that LFM and RAP have got updates in place to correct the problem and I'm sure other script producers have addresed it as well.
Don't be caught unawares tomorrow. Get the latest updates installed for your scripts today - and check with customer support if you are unsure.
Martin
Call Center Fuel - High Volume Data
Delivering the highest quality leads in virtually all consumer verticals.