Automatic product delivery via free email

Hello everyone and Happy New Year!

Hope you all had a swell time ringing in the new, and I hope you're all as committed to growing your successful blogs as I am.

One of the things I was experimenting with over the holiday was a way to solve a problem I had when I offered my e-book for sale via PayPal. Though I specified a "thank you" page destination where the download was immediately available, not everyone got to that page. I think maybe it has something to do with whether they pay with PayPal or a credit card. Anyway, I digress.

The solution I came up with (not like it's pioneering or anything, but it is tested and operational) is this. I set up a special email account in Gmail that only does order fulfillment. I set that account's vacation message to be the fulfillment email and have it set to auto-respond. Then, I forward the PayPal payments to THAT address.

At least, that was the initial solution, but it then occurred to me that all anyone would have to do is to try to send email to that address and they would get my product download link for free! We can't have that.

After some testing, I determined that I can use certain pieces of text that I know will be included in the PayPal receipt email as a filter. I set the "order fulfillment" email address to delete emails that do not contain those certain pieces of text. When I do this, only genuine receipt emails will get the autoresponse and everything else gets deleted. Sure, it's still hackable, but it would be very time consuming to do so, since the "hacker" will have no idea WHICH piece of text I'm looking for.

I hope to use this process as a stop-gap for the folks who don't make it to the thank-you page via PayPal.

Of course, before you implement something like this yourself, read all the TOC docs involved and make sure you're compliant.

Hope my little experiment here proves useful to some of you folks.

Talk again soon!