PayPal Update Required? Reply to topic

Starting the 7th of October, 2013, we will require all incoming requests to have a “Host” header which complies with HTTP 1.1 Specifications. This header was not required under HTTP 1.0. IPN and PDT scripts using HTTP 1.0 may start failing with “HTTP/1.0 400 Bad Request” errors after the 7th of October, 2013, which will result in IPN messages not being validated successfully, or PDT scripts not being able to retrieve transaction information.

Action Required before the 7th of October, 2013

Merchants need to update their IPN and/or PDT scripts to use HTTP 1.1, and include the “Host” and “Connection: close” HTTP header in the IPN postback script.

Example with Host as www.paypal.com (please make necessary changes if you are using ipnpb.paypal.com):

ASP
//Set values for the request back
req.Method="POST";
req.Host="'www.paypal.com'";
req.ContentType="application/x-www-form-urlencoded";

Perl
$req=HTTP::Request->new('POST', 'https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr');
$req->content_type('application/x-www-form-urlencoded');
$req->header(Host=> 'www.paypal.com');
$req->header(Connection=> 'close');
PHP
// post back to PayPal system to validate
$header="POST /cgi-bin/webscr HTTP/1.1\r\n";
$header .="Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded\r\n";
$header .="Host: www.paypal.com\r\n";
$header .="Connection: close\r\n\r\n";

Java
HttpsURLConnection uc=(HttpsURLConnection) u.openConnection();
uc.setDoOutput(true);
uc.setRequestProperty("Content-Type","application/x-www-form-urlencoded");
uc.setRequestProperty("Host", "www.paypal.com");
uc.setRequestProperty("Connection", "Close");

The PayPal Sandbox has been configured to reject any HTTP requests without the “Host” header with HTTP 400 error. Merchants can use the Sandbox environment to certify the changes to their IPN and PDT scripts.

For more information on PDT and IPN, please refer to www.paypal.com/pdt and www.paypal.com/ipn. For additional information or questions about this change, please contact PayPal's Merchant Technical Support team via www.paypal.com/mts.