Magento not sending new order confirmation

I recently set up a Magento 1.8 store and I added PayPal payments as standard payment type.

After setting it up I tried to test a sale trough Megento PayPal integration.Well, here all the problems started and I had the following issues :
– Megento was not sending out Order Confirmation e-mails for new orders.
– PayPal payments were all marked “Pending Payment” even if the order was captured and the money pulled out from the PayPal account.
– Magento was not sending e-mails with the new order confirmation to the admin either. Only PayPal notification e-mails were sent you.

First I thought it is my mail server acting up and I started to make changes and modify all kind of settings, it did not help.
Then I started to look after bugs in the new Magento 1.8.1 , nothing there either.

Then I found this pretty useful post :

http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/3_-_store_setup_and_management/payment/paypal_standard_payments_setup_with_ipn

Very useful article and I followed the steps one by one, but nothing, still the Magento PayPal payments remained with the status “Pending Payment”. No e-mails sent to the customer, no e-mail sent to the admin.

After trying all kind of stuff for many many hours I finally discovered the problem. My site was not using SSL and there is one “obscure” setting on the PayPal Standard payments in the admin interface of the magento : “Enable SSL verification”. As soon as I turned this to OFF, the orders started changing status, e-mails started to flow, everything was working great.

So in order to have PayPal payments working on my Magento 1.8 I just had to set “Enable SSL verification” to “No”.

Hope this will help also others that has same problems.