Receiving PayPal Payments
March 10, 2007 – 6:05 pm
I use PayPal for some clients to pay me, and also to accept payments from a few product selling sites I have. Besides one very suspicious payment I've not encountered any problems until recently.
I have about 3 or 4 emails set up to receive money for my paypal account. The main one is my business email address naturally. The others are email addresses for the sites which sell the products. I reckon it looks better when the PayPal account you're paying is in the name of the site you've just been on. Of course there's a limit to the number of email addresses you can have (5 I think) but until you've notched up a few sales via your account to boost that counter besides your name in PayPal, you need to try and do what you can to give the buyer confidence in you (well that's my belief anyhow!).
Anyhow, that aside, I recently made a sale on one of my sites to a secondary email account. The email account got notification of this, but I didn't as I'd not set the email account up correctly after a recent reinstall. So I never had notification of the purchase until I logged into PayPal and saw the sale in there. Luckily it was within good time and the buyer was fine about it all, but had I not logged in and seen the sale, it wouldn't have looked good. Before anyone mentions it, this site can't be run automatically as I resell digital products and don't have the products to send on instantly 
So, perhaps I'm missing something, but why does PayPal only notify the email address that the payment was made to? Surely it would be a good idea for them to notify your main address too. Am I the only one who finds this frustrating? Or have I simply missed the option to do this (probably, knowing me!)
8 Responses to “Receiving PayPal Payments”
Do you not have the secondary addresses set up as forwarders to the main one? I think that's probably the best route to go down, short of setting them up as separate accounts in your mail client.
By David Salisbury on Mar 11, 2007
That's the only solution I've thought of however my reason for asking about this is because when I'm out and about or away for a couple of days I only tend to check my business email via my telephone. Trouble with forwarding this other email is that it gets a lot of spam through which I don't fancy paying to download!
I may be able to work out a filter on the email to work out a way to grab the PayPal emails and forward them on. It's just strange that you can't do this within PayPal.
By Sarah on Mar 11, 2007
You could use the cPanel mail filtering module to setup a redirect for mail from anything@paypal.com. Obviously there would be some spam ones slipping through. Maybe do a check of the Received: headers for a paypal mailserver or something like that?
By David Salisbury on Mar 11, 2007
Yeah that's what I was thinking. If I can't find any other solution I'll probably go that way
Cheers Dave.
By Sarah on Mar 11, 2007
It might be worthwhile having a discussion about what you use to access email on the road.
I'm using a Palm TX PDA in conjuntion with a Nokia 6230 for emails and web browsing. All day GPRS access is only £1 a day with Orange PAYG. Works out relatively cheap if you're only using it a couple days a week.
By Will on Mar 14, 2007
I use my Nokia N73. It's not as big as my PDA but it's fine for reading emails and attachments, and you can also subscribe to rss feeds directly on it. I don't have anything extra for GPRS as my use isn't consistent or overly frequent. The costs in my bill are showing at around 0.5-1p per check which I can live with
By Sarah on Mar 14, 2007
You can use the David's recommended way. But I think that its better to contact Paypal support about it, and also post here what they say about it.
btw, N73 is my fav cell, I have it too.
Cheers
By Donald J Pliner on Mar 17, 2007
I'll probably take a good look over the paypal site at some point to be doubley sure it's not possible and then perhaps drop them a line. In the mean time a filter's been set in place on all the sub accounts to make my life easier
Cheers for stopping by.
By Sarah on Mar 17, 2007