Dev/Ops is aware of and investigating this sporadic issue that's recently cropped up, so rare and sporadic it's been hard to identify any common pattern. Thus far, it seems to be most prevalent with Internet Explorer users and may be related to the last batch of Windows Updates released by Microsoft the second Tuesday of every month. It might help our investigation if you could email us some affected Transaction IDs to research in particular:

1https://www.e-junkie.com/ej/contact.php1



One buyer had told their seller something about allowing Remote Volume Management in Windows Firewall apparently allowed their download to proceed, but that could just be coincidental, as it doesn't seem relevant to anything about HTTP downloads in a browser. Even when we've done some testing ourselves, a download that stalls as soon as it starts may yet succeed without a hitch when retrying it mere moments later, with no apparent difference in what's happening at our end in either case. It seems to be a client-side bug or issue or some sort; we're serving up the download HTTP session exactly the same in all cases, yet sometimes the browser end just drops the ball as soon as we hand it off, as far as we can tell.



All we can suggest at present is, keep re-activating expired links, maybe bump up your permitted Attempts (and add an Hours limit if you don't have one already), and maybe suggest affected buyers try a different browser program. If they only have IE, I like to recommend Google Chrome myself, as it's quick to download and install, any user can install it without Admin privileges, it's really light and responsive to use, and it even auto-updates itself quietly in the background:

http://chrome.google.com/

People in a corporate environment may not have options other than IE, and they may not have access to firewall settings.



The problem does seem more common in the past several days or so, from one or two a week to one every day or so.



The Windows Updates is plausable, because I don't think I suddenly have vastly less proficient customers.



Usually the update is successful after a short delay (the time to send me an email and for me to respond).

Hi everyone,



I've been looking into this off and on for the last week, from various angles from individual problem reports to high-level descriptive statistics (I highly recommend R+rggobi+GGobi), and I'm really not seeing anything on our or S3's part that could be the problem. The pattern I'm seeing so far everywhere I've been able to get this data is this:



* product file is an .exe

* browser is IE

-> OS is Windows (usually 7)



The thing about the way IE works is, it first downloads the file off to temporary folder; then it triggers whatever internal and external malware-scanning facilities have been registered; then it copies the file to its final destination, which makes for a stall at the end of the download. Usually it's just a few seconds, but if something's gumming up the process, you could wait minutes before it completes; an impatient user would probably decide it has failed and cancel.



IE is known to be overly sensitive to various addons, and when was the last time you downloaded something free and it didn't try to install some IE toolbar? While I concur with Tyson's suggestion of an alternate browser--I couldn't work without Firefox--I realize that's not a workable solution for the average customer; we want to make things easier for them, not more complicated.



Unfortunately, the only somewhat reasonable suggestion I can make right now is that you zip your files. Yes, it's another step for the user. Fortunately, every copy of Windows since (98SE?) has had zip support built-in. I don't know why having the executable zipped helps--any competent malware scanner will scan inside archives--but it does seem to. I do note that in certain environments, especially corporate, downloading of bare .exe files may be blocked outright.



If anyone has data that don't match this profile in any way, we'd love to see them. We'd also be interested to know what anti-malware you're running; I know from my time in corporate IT, Symantec/Norton and McAfee were major sources of problems.

Then from what we can tell so far, it seems this problem is limited to sporadic IE users downloading .exe files, and quite probably caused by something introduced with the last batch of Windows Updates for this month, and unfortunately nothing we can do anything to mitigate, as it's entirely a client-side behavioral issue that transpires after our end has already staged the download for IE to manage on its own from that point onward.



We do have a way to offer multiple download links for a single product; however, this would increase the number of products your subscription plan would need to support (one for each file, and one more for the "bundle" that you'd actually sell):

http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/help.package.htm#bundle



For buyers having a problem with expired WinZip trials, you could recommend an always-free alternative; my favorite is IZArc, others prefer 7-Zip. Perhaps you could add a link to the download page for one of those on your thank-you pages (similar to how many PDF eBook sellers include a link to download Adobe Reader or FoxIt Reader, etc.):

http://www.izarc.org/download.html

http://www.7-zip.org/download.html

I'd like to follow up on this freezing at the start of the download if I could. Is it happening before the run/save dialog (or whatever your IE normally does) comes up, or after? That makes a difference.



One problem we've had historically is anti-malware software that does proactive link scanning on web pages... we do some javascript trickery to stop these things from expiring links and doubly+ downloading files to scan, but it's possible they've worked around it and the same old problems are back--i.e. the hang you're seeing is the scanner downloading the whole file first to make sure it's safe, after which the download should proceed (again). If you disable this "feature" and test, do you still have this hangs-at-start problem? Just an idea...

Daniel,



Apparently even AVG Free includes a link scanner, since at least version 8. I'm not finding any reference to a way to just temporarily disable that feature, but here's how to install (the latest version) without that component in the first place, if you're willing to go to that length to test:



http://free.avg.com/us-en/faq.num-1338#num-1338

Daniel,



That does help. At this point, in regards to that particular problem, we suspect something related to the way newer versions of IE allow malware scanners to hook in. I don't think it's exclusive to AVG; we've had reports of the same problem with the free Microsoft Security Essentials as well.



The problematic interaction could be the SmartScreen feature; if you wanted to test that, reinstall AVG with the link scanner, and then disable SmartScreen (In Internet Explorer, click the Safety button on the toolbar. Point to SmartScreen Filter, and then click Turn Off SmartScreen Filter.) See if downloads are reliable or not.



The trick for us is to come up with a way to work around these problems on our end. I briefly considered setting a bucket policy at S3 based on the user agent string, so that link scanners would just get a short response and hopefully move on, but it turns out that at least one version of the AVG link scanner uses a string identical to IE6. As much as I would enjoy blocking all users of that particular security and compatibility disaster, probably not a good idea.

Hi,



We sell only PDF files, no exe's, and have been having the same problem for days.



Half of our buyers since Saturday have either given up and contacted us or used up their 5 attempts. Most report that the failure comes at the start of the download.



They aren't interested in troubleshooting, I tried with a few and they started suspecting I was running a scam.



It's a shame, if it keeps up, I'll have to dump e-Junkie and just start sending PDF files as attachments.



Morris

It's now been more than a week that one of my buyers has been unable to succesfully complete the download of one of my items that until now has never had any download problems.



After reading this thread, I have to agree wth MadMoe: while I love e-junkie and its overall fabulous ease of use, unless this problem is solved, I'd have to find another service to avoid this problem. Having said that, I urge e-junkie to make the solution of this problem an absolute top priority issue, even calling in outside experts to solve this problem ASAP. Sometimes, that's the cost of doing business and yes, it bites into the budget.



Like others who have posted here, the need for delivering .exe files is paramount. As simple as PDF files are to open and use, ther's still a huge number of Internet users who will never understand, or take the time to understand, how to open them and then how to find them or place shortcuts on their desktops. I speak from experience with buyers: an .exe file works and keeps buyers happy.



I was just about to launch a special sales campaign for my downloadable e-junkie products; now, unfortunately, I guess I'll have to wait until I hear from you saying that the problem has been resolved--so please be SURE to send an e-mail as soon as it has for all our sakes.



For what it's worth, here's the info on the problem the buyer I mention here is having.



Repeated download attempts keep timing out. He suspected it might have been Norton antivirus software, disabled it, and no luck. Then he decided to try on his netbook. Both systems running Windows 7. Here's an email he just sent this morning: "I used my Netbook, shut down Norton and got to the download Website. I started the download, but it did not seem to be making any progress. After about 5 minutes I received the following message. 'Internet Explorer can not download mpmsetup.exe from s3.amazonaws.com. The operation timed out.' Help"



Like the buyer says, "HELP!"



gkaywood

Daniel,



Thanks for the additional testing--and sorry we're having to have you do this! Just you're our most reliable reproducer right now :-/ I've got some additional test cases I'm working on which I'll send you through support.



Everyone,



Rest assured we are escalating this internally.

I had a new ebook release on Thursday and so far 18 of my customers have experienced this hanging download. This has never happened before. It doesn't seem to be related to the file format of the book they're downloading; it's happened with multiple types of ebook formats.



Any closer to a solution? I'd be happy to provide info on the customers' OS/Browser combos or the order numbers of each case it that would help.



-JCP Books

Hi, I thought I'd add what my customers are experiencing. We only sell mp3 and pdf files and I've been getting more and more complaints from customers.



I tried to download once on my laptop and everything worked fine. A couple of days later I tried again and it completly stalled out. I hadn't changed anything as far as firewalls, AVG or malware protection. The only difference was that I was using a slower internet connection the second time and it just stopped with out even downloading a thing. I left it open for a half hour and it didn't move.



I have a windows vista 32 bit operating system. AVG and malware antivirus software and IE8. Customers have written into me saying both the mp3 files and the .zip files that we use to sell albums are not downloading. So far I have been re-directing them to Firefox and Chrome and it seems to work just fine.



Let me know what I can do to help get this figured out.



Thanks

Positive Music and Downloads