Thread

Hello,

I have a site set up with Simple Commerce, and the client has been complaining that purchase confirmation emails (from the EE system, not from PayPal) are taking nearly 2 days to be delivered. This is also happening with the email alerts for the site’s contact form.

Could this be an EE issue or a server issue?

Thanks.

Hi, Kristen. Can you send yourself an email message through Communicate? Do you get it in a timely manner? That’s the first thing I’d test.

Hi Sue,

Yes, I received the email in a timely manner. What does that mean?

Hi, Kristen.

That means that in your particular case, email is flowing. Try sending to one of the email addresses that is having problems using Communicate. Is it still an issue then?

If it is delayed, then the issue is with the mail server on the receiving end.

If you add your email to the contact form, is there a delay too?

Hi Sue,

I sent an email to the client using communicate, and it was received in a timely manner. The contact form is also delivered to my address in a timely manner.

The only time the client appears to be having the problem is when she makes a PayPal purchase from herself to test a newly-created product. She says the Paypal emails are being delivered fine, and that only the EE Simple Commerce system emails are delayed.

I was looking at the Simple Commerce Module docs today and saw this:

Note: While you can still use Simple Commerce generated PayPal links to sell items to users browsing your site as guests, the Instant Payment Notification features, such as transaction recording and email notifications, will only work for purchases made by logged-in members of your site.

So if guests make a purchase on the site, EE won’t send SCM system emails?

Hi Kristen,

That’s correct. Because of the way EE has to handle IPN responses from PayPal, it’s only able to record those transactions and send email notifications for purchases that were made by logged-in users.

Even so, that shouldn’t cause a delay in emails sent from EE to confirm the purchase. As soon as EE receives the IPN, it sends the email. Could you examine the raw source of one of the delayed emails to check the timestamps from the time it was sent by EE to when it was received by the user? I can only imagine there’s something related to one of the email servers that’s causing the delay.

Hi Kevin,

I’ll look into that and get back to you, thanks.

Hey Kristen,

Were you able to compare timestamps as Kevin suggested?

We’d still like to help you get to the bottom of this.

Keep us posted.

Thanks! 😊