Greetings Lemonbar (and the rest of the E-Junkie community),



First, if you received a payment from PayPal which did not also appear in your E-junkie logs at all, then E-junkie never handled that transaction in the first place. Someone must have sent a payment directly to your PayPal email without using your E-junkie cart at all.



As for the unrelated issues this afternoon, as Tyson mentioned in the Service Status & Updates forum -- http://www.e-junkie.com/bb/topic/2579 -- our upstream DNS provider shut us down without warning. This happened with no advance notice, no "XYZ hours to comply", no chance to avoid or prevent what they did before their deed was done. Almost as soon as things started going down, Tyson and I began heading over to the datacenter while Robin began investigating what was going on from in-house, so that we would have all of our bases covered once the specific problem was identified. As Tyson and I were enroute to the datacenter, Robin called to let us know that we could turn around due to the source of the problem being identified with the upstream DNS provider, nothing to do with our own systems or the datacenter at all.



When Tyson and I got back to the office, Robin and I proceeded to call into the upstream DNS provider to try and find out a more specific reason for their actions while Tyson began looking through what little remained accessible of our email-ticket system to see if there was any notice or explanation from them. On two separate phone calls to the upstream DNS provider, their agent(s) only yelled something at us about being "terminated for abuse" and then proceeded to literally hang up on us, without any further explanation or chance to remedy the situation. In all my years of working in and out of the tech community, I have never seen such an unprofessional response -- I honestly don't even know what more to say to that.



Meanwhile, Tyson managed to find the only notice they'd sent, which provided our first clue as to what exactly had happened and why. Just half an hour earlier (about the time we had started noticing things going wrong), they'd sent us an email stating they had been notified that one of our Merchants was suspected of offering material claimed to be in potential violation of someone else's copyright, and thus they were suspending provision of their services to us, effective immediately. With them having pulled that rug from under us so abruptly, we were lucky to get into our support-ticket queue to even find their message before the DNS for our helpdesk, too, fell prey to their revocation of services. Normally, such DMCA-related claims follow a legally-proscribed process where we would be given the chance to notify the relevant Merchant, who would then have an opportunity to take down the allegedly-infringing content themselves before we took it down for them, and long before our upstream provider would threaten to take down our entire service, so this seemed a knee-jerk reaction on their part, to say the least.



Besides the obvious, temporary service interruption, four things are now resulting from this event:



1) We will be moving our DNS hosting in-house. There are pros and cons to this approach, with the pro being that we will not be held captive by an upstream provider, and the con being that had we not used this company a month ago, we wouldn't have been able to seamlessly switch between datacenters with minimal downtime.



2) For purposes of redundancy, we will be setting up a separate and minimal domain at a separate datacenter that will be dedicated to system service status & updates, which will be independent of our core system. Upon completion of the domain, we will be announcing that to the E-Junkie community and would recommend that everyone bookmark it so that we can stay in touch with all of you and keep you informed as to what is going on.



3) Our counsel are now exploring legal options due to such rash actions having affected not only our business but all of our customers' businesses as well.



4) Once the higher-priority items above are at a manageable level, we are going to start logging all DMCA abuses at http://www.chillingeffects.org/ just as Google and several other big names have already been doing.



Cordially,

Thad (E-Junkie Development) and Tyson (E-Junkie Support)

In the case where there was indeed an E-junkie log entry and email, but the email was not sent immediately, the buyer most likely funded their PayPal payment by eCheck. Since the banks process an eCheck just like a real, paper check, those payments can take from several days up to a week or so to clear; furthermore, the so-called "instant transfer" method can sometimes also take a day for some banks, if they can't/won't process any payment outside of their business hours. Since we do not issue a thank-you email with any download link or codes until a payment clears for certain, you could have seen a delay in those cases.



If you wish, you can bypass waiting for payments to clear and have us issue the thank-you email/link/code immediately, if you'd rather give your buyers instant gratification and assume the risk that their payment might not clear. The setting for this is in your Seller Admin > Edit Account Preferences screen.

Hey guys,



Thanks for a great post. You handled the situation well, and we're not upset



Right now, I am actually more annoyed about Enterhost.com not handling their business properly and causing massive downtime on Friday. They haven't explained what caused hundreds (if not thousands) of dedicated server customers to lose all access for 4+ hours. All websites, e-mail, even Enterhost.com went down. They had zero backup plans -- no blog, no status updates, no phone lines, etc. For a company of that size, opening a Typepad.com or Blogger.com account would make a lot of sense.



Compared to Enterhost.com, your handling of the situation is MUCH better. Thanks from the Mixed In Key team.



All the best,

Yakov



http://www.MixedInKey.com

@Lemonbar:



Right, when a buyer pays for their eBay auction item via your PayPal account, PayPal only informs us of the transaction (IPN) after the payment clears as good and complete. Our system has no way of knowing about any eBay auction purchases until PayPal transmits that auction-payment IPN to us, which they only do after completing payment in full.

lemonbarOk I will keep trying:



Curious, where did it get stored or how did you get ahold of that payment notice? Does PayPal keep trying forever if you are offline?

PayPal keeps trying for a few days.