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

There is literally no functional difference whatsoever between clicking the link to the thank-you/download page in the email vs. copying that link and pasting it into the browser's address bar. I think it only appeared to be a "solution" simply because the second download attempt often succeeds after the first one fails, regardless of how the buyer reached the download page in either case.



That's because the real problem seems to be related to anti-virus/security software on the buyer's computer trying to provide "real time Web browsing protection" (or equivalent marketing-speak) by preemptively scanning Web page links and downloaded files looking for malicious files before the user can open them and potentially unleash a virus or other malware on their computer. Those pre-scans are apparently sometimes getting tripped up and stalling the download on the first try but, depending on which security software they're using and how it works, by the time users try the download a second time it's either finished pre-scanning the file or has already logged the actual file-download URL as scanned, so then the download goes normally without the security software's intervention holding up the whole show.



That seems to suggest that MAYBE, at least with some security software, asking buyers to wait a while before trying the download again, might have some positive effect on their results at the next download attempt. Ultimately however, we may all just be stuck waiting on Microsoft to release a bugfix for whatever component of Windows or IE is broken that these security programs are all trying to hook into and apparently getting stuck on. Microsoft releases a big batch of Windows Updates on the second Tuesday of each month, so let's all keep our fingers crossed for next week Tuesday.

Why would they be able to successfully download from yousendit.com then?

While it's good to see that e-junkie is working on this problem, it's disheartening, to say the least, to hear the suggestion that I should say to a customer "Well, you might have to download what you bought again" and even worse to read that "we all might be stuck waiting on Microsoft...."



Sellers of e-junkie use it because it's a 24/7 service.



I would expect, as radical as it may sound, that the e-junkie techs should also be working 24/7 to fix what's broken and bring in outside help if that's what it takes.



I understand that the problem may well be within IE and is Microsoft-driven. But it certainly e-junkie's responsibility to fix it or come up with a temporary alternative, and quickly.

I'm also having the same problem as discussed above. My experience has been Windows Vista, or 7, 32 bit and 64 bit OS.



As indicated, it is becoming a problem with irate customers thinking you're trying to scam them.



I'm also thinking of switching to something more dependable, like 1shoppingcart.com but I've been here a long time, enjoy using ejunkie and don't want to switch.

My products are all zip files, and I've experienced a drastic increase in the number of people complaining that product didn't download over the last week or so.



My most popular products are bundles, so they buy a product that has 7 separate zip files to download and often it's just ONE of the 7 that times out and they try until they use their attempts up. It's hard to imagine that a scan would effect just ONE of the 7 files?



Also, the majority of my customers are photographers and mac users, so I'd be surprised if all of these are IE users.. I will start to ask though to know for sure.

Everyone,



Please, if you haven't already, open a ticket with support by using the contact form, so that we can track your specific incidence of this issue.



We have a team working on it, but they're still having trouble even reproducing the problem, trying all kinds of things, so every little bit of data you can send us, any hint of commonality between users/systems experiencing the problem (or refutation of what we previously thought) could be helpful. Everything down to individual affected transaction ids.



Our most reliable reproducer at first emailed us yesterday wondering what we did to fix it, saying that he hasn't had any complaints in a week now and can't reproduce it himself. We haven't made any changes; that's how crazy this problem is.



Honestly, unless we can develop a repeatable test case, we're at the point of just throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks; taking out various components of our download process (all of which are there for a reason!) to see what happens. I am about to disable the s3 cache for everyone who posted to this thread, so that your customers' downloads will be served directly from our servers; we'll try that for a day and see if there's any impact.



Ellen

E-junkie Engineering & Development

thanks for the post engineering...

where do we go to open a ticket?

That "contact" link in the bar at the bottom of every page will do the trick, and we generally prefer it because it auto-fills your information so we don't have to go hunting to figure out what account the message is in reference to.



However, we realize the form can be a pain sometimes; you can also just email support@e-junkie.com; please do include the client id# of the account in question.

Is it useful to know transaction IDS even if we don't know what browser they were using?

Ariana,

Possibly, so please do send them (through support) if it's not too much trouble.



Everyone,

It took me a bit of poking to figure out how to do it, but effective 3:40pm MST, I just cut off the s3 for your downloads if your client id is in this list:

18167, 124955, 17582, 5945, 37624, 38156, 21404, 84674



Note I haven't modified the code, just did a little backend database trickery, so any new uploads you do will get transfered to and served from s3 as normal.



Please let us know if this causes any noticeable change for you, good or bad. This is just a test, not a fix--we need to leverage the cloud for low-cost scalability.



Ellen

I'm one of the client ID's above. So far, (last night and today) I haven't had any complaints. Whether this means your test was a success or not, I don't know.

Finally got somebody with five failed downloads to reply to a question.



"I am running Windows XP SP3 and have Webroot as my AV. Hope everything works

out on getting down to the problem and fixing it."



Has anybody been chasing AWS to see if they are having trouble with other clients (other than eJunkie) using their infrastructure?



Seems to me the last few days have been much better, a week ago I was getting multiple fails per day.



Morris

My customer could not access the download page after their purchase (transaction ID gc-642055226814685). They received a message that: IE cannot open the site; operation aborted.

using IE and never tried from their email message. They selected the button confirmation after purchasing the file.



The log shows no attempt to download, they never could get that far.



I then sent a free link to them because they were then at work without access to the email they ordered with (j-lhg25v340ca2124). She used her yahoo email address and yahoo webmail to click the link. Message: IE cannot open the site; operation aborted.



She tried to copy and paste the link; same message: IE cannot open the site; operation aborted.



I am having to send here the file using yousendit.com



I have the files on my server not e-junkie.

I'm on that list of client IDs. Five of my epub files became corrupt sometime within the last few days. I re-uploaded the files (with no changes to the uploaded files) and now they download and open normally.