>Do you get this?

i’m trying 🙂

as i understand it (and assuming you are not using a multisite setup – CORRECT ME IF I’M WRONG ON THAT ONE):

a) to start off with: distinguishing between food and catering just confuses the issue
they are just items you put into the cart and then pay for them . it is irrelevant what category any of these items are assigned to

b) the way this works (or at least should) is as follows (regardless of whether the items in the cart are “catering” or “food” or “man on the moon”):
– customer goes to checkout and elects to pay with paypal
– customer gets redirected to paypal and pays (and then gets redirected back to site, but that’s irrelevant here)
– when paypal has executed the payment, 2 things happen (in the background).
–a paypal IPN notification gets sent back to your site which – amongst other things – sends an email to you with the order (which is the same email the customer gets)
— paypal itself might also send you a notification email (which seems to be setup that way in your case)

none of the above is influenced by whether or not the shop is shut at the time. if they pay, you should get the email(s) as this is a background process

>Is there a slight timing change so we can get both emails?
what do you mean ? timing has nothing to do with it . emails are sent when they are sent…

>I think we just need to make a small website change so we will get the second email when a customer pays through paypal. no problem getting a payment email from paypal. No website email on the customers order.

again, if paypal executes it sends an IPN notification (provided you enabled it of course)
whether your shop is open or not at the time is irrelevant.

let me ask you again: “do the ipn notifications in your paypal account say “sent” ?

one more suggestion:
check for a common denominator for the emails that didn’t get through.
i.e are they all hotmail or yahoo mails for instance ?

i know for example, that yahoo doesn’t like it when the from address is [email protected] but it is being sent from austinpizza.com site/domain (in which case setting a static from address in the wppizza plugin to somethng like [email protected] might help )

>The restaurant websites hours are perfectly open now but paypal payments are failing again

have you turned on logging in the paypal gateway ? what do the logs say ?