title: How to find recent payments in Paypal
body: <p>I'm trying to add a payment option for an application to allow users to donate/pay for certain features. To do this, I want to have the application periodically check PayPal for recent payments, preferably using a PayPal API.</p>
  
  <p>I've looked at the PayPal IPN, and that seems to require that you own a web-server which PayPal can send an HTTP request to. However, I'm trying to avoid linking the application with a web-server. The other PayPal APIs I have looked at (I'm only looking at official APIs), from what I can tell, don't serve the purpose I seek.</p>
  
  <p>The user experience I'm seeking is that the user will give the application their PayPal email address, donate/pay on the Paypal website to my account (or whoever's account). My application will then check PayPal for the past X donations, and reward the user accordingly if their email address is found on there and that payment has not yet been rewarded. The reason I want to do this is for security. I'll probably be publishing my work as open source, and I don't want someone modifying it and keeping the user's PayPal credentials.</p>
  
  <p>So, a recap, <strong>which (if any) PayPal API would I use to check if there are any recent donations to a given account?</strong> Ideally, <strong>the user will donate/pay money on the PayPal website</strong> to an account, and the application will identify that transaction and reward the user appropriately. I intend to do this in Java, so I can use any Java APIs or web APIs that I can subsequently call with HTTP requests.</p>
  
  <p>If I'm going about this the wrong way, or if it's impossible, let me know.</p>