Paypal NOTIFICATION_REFUSED_NO_CONNECTION

Hello,

The shop process seems to be ok but when somebody make payment through Paypal, Admin receive a lot of emails that says:
"Hello, A Paypal notification was refused because the connection to the confirmation server failed."

A lot of emails means around 10 emails in 5 minutes and more than 20 while a day.

The shop and the payment are done but admin receive all these emails.

One idea to solve it?
I use Hikashop Business.

Thanks for your support.

I am having precisely this problem. I checked with my hosting company:

1. Can I make outgoing connections?


Yes, you can. You'll need to make sure that that the proper IP address of
your server (XXXXXXXXXX) is whitelisted so they accept your
connections.

2. is "the open ssl option activated in the PHP configuration?" Is that the case with my current site?

Yes, SSL with PHP is active on our servers.


I feel that the first answer was definitive but don't know if PayPal whitelists IP addresses. The second answer is more vague but I'm stuck (not having background in PHP, etc....)

I don't have any security type components, modules or plugins. Unless there is some global configuration or Hikashop system setting that is causing this issue, I don't know what it could be.

My Joomla mail settings are:

Mailer: PHP mail function
Sendmail path: usr/sbin/sendmail

System emails (new user registration, notifications of comments on articles, etc....) have all been working fine.

Thanks again for the follow up. I've pressed my hosting company further and this is their question:

You will need to ask the developer what port number the application is attempting to communicate open. We do not open non-standard ports on shared hosting machine such as the one you are on.

Please let me know.

Thanks.

This is the communication that I received from my hosting company:

Port 443 is a standard port and is open on our servers. There is nothing
on our servers or network that would prevent communication using on this
port.

Now with that being the case and based on previous posts to this thread, it seems like there are not only no solutions, but no more ideas as to what the problem can be. Either one of two things have to happen at this point:

I disable the authentication feature with paypals servers (not good)

or

I can't use Hikashop (I can't receive 15-20 failed connection attempt emails per day per order).

This issue is the last functionality problem before my store can go live and also the only thing holding me back before I step up to Hikashop Business. I want to make sure all of the basic configurations are correct and the component is fully operable as a free version before I invest. But up till now, it's been a wonderfully smooth program.

Ok, thanks again. I think that at this point the easiest thing to do would be to remove the IPN check and take my chances... my average retail price is very low anyway. The chunk of code to remove, can you please let me know that first line of code and the last so that I don't delete vital info.? I at least want the hikashop program to update when paypal customers make a payment--esp. in regards to downloads. Thanks!

Thanks for your assistance. I have removed the PHP to disallow the IPN check with PayPal's servers. Everything works smoothly now except the component does not update to "confirmed" when the PayPal payment is made. I receive the following email from PayPal:

Hello,
A Paypal notification was received with the status Completed. The order status was not changed.

The "allow notifications" in the plugin is set to yes. Is there anything that I can do to make the Hikashop component update its system to "confirmed" so that digital downloads are available as soon as the payment is completed?

Hi Nicolas,

I see this is a very old thread but I'm having the same problem that's only just occurred in the last week, the Hikashop has been working happily for over a year but all of sudden the orders are all coming back with "Paypal payment notification refused: Connection to Paypal failed for the order XXXX".

Similar to the thread, the end user experience is normal and all goes through but the order doesn't get switched to Confirmed at the end and these notifications start coming through and you get ~10-20 per order.

I've been checking with my host company to see if anything changed and they pulled up the firewall logs etc. and have found nothing is blocking the outbound connections and they have noticed that the rejections only started a few days ago on the 9th of August and they can see that what's being recorded back is a 403 forbidden status for the ipn calls.

Here was one that was fine on the 1st August

173.0.81.1 - - [01/Aug/2017:12:30:13 +0100] "POST /index.php?option=com_hikashop&ctrl=checkout&task=notify¬if_payment=paypal&tmpl=component&lang=en&Itemid=865 HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "PayPal IPN ( www.paypal.com/ipn )"

And then they are seeing this now on calls with a 403 status.

173.0.81.1 - - [09/Aug/2017:18:42:17 +0100] "POST /index.php?option=com_hikashop&ctrl=checkout&task=notify¬if_payment=paypal&tmpl=component&lang=en&Itemid=905 HTTP/1.1" 403 2088 "-" "PayPal IPN ( www.paypal.com/ipn )"

I've updated to the latest version of Joomla 3.7.4 and HikaShop 3.1.1 to make sure it was a version problem but on repeating an order this is still happening and getting loads of these alerts through.

>>>
Paypal payment notification refused: Connection to Paypal failed for the order XXXX

Hello,
A Paypal notification was refused because the connection to the confirmation server failed.

Check the documentation concerning this issue at www.hikashop.com/index.php?option=com_up...pal-error#connection
This notification was for the order XXXX on the website www.websitename.com
You can access the order details directly by clicking on the link below after logging in your back end:
www.websitename.com/administrator/index....sk=edit&order_id=224
>>>

I noticed in the thread the proposed method of taking out a chunk of code from the paypal.php file won't work now as the source code has changed significantly and the two lines of code mentioned are in very different places in the file.

Any ideas? Other than turning off the "Allow payment notifications from PayPal Payment" - by the way with this option, turning it off, what other alerts are disabled? I assume the seller and buyer still get all the same transactional emails and notifications? But I understand this isn't going to fix the other problem that the order isn't getting updated from Created to Confirmed...

Any help greatly appreciated - many thanks.