Paypal Express Logs - What do they mean?

1.39h, no addons, using paypal express. I was wondering if people were having trouble with paypal. I hadn't gotten any complaints but I'd noticed more people paying by check/money order than normal. So I turned on paypal express error reporting from off to "logging and email." The small print said that it would report ERRORS.

Well the first purchase came through 20 minutes later and I got hit with 50 emails (maybe more - I forward my emails to my home email and to my yahoo - yahoo shut it down at 50 and my home email blocked it at 6).

There is a whole series titled IPN DEBUG Message #1 thru #15. Two have all the customer data in it, the rest have little blurbs like:
Breakpoint: 2 - Validated transaction components

Then there are 5 more message before_process EC-1 thru 5

and on and on...
Of course I hurried on over to the admin page and turned off logging and email before I got flooded.

Is this normal? My gut says yes because the order went through fine and none of them seem to say anything bad like "ERROR 127.x5 ABORT ABORT!!!!" so I'm guessing it is just creating a lot entry for every little command processed or action taken from the time the guy clicked checkout until it was done? And instead of emailing me one simple logfile it sent an email for each one?

What you describe is normal.

Logging writes out data at about a hundred (okay, actually maybe 30) separate steps in the process. When you have it set to email you instead of just log-to-file, you will get an email at each of those steps.

So when using the debug logging, I always set it to Log To File, and go look at the log files using my FTP program.
The email option is really only there for instances when accessing FTP is impossible or temporarily unsuitable (such as being away from the office temporarily) or when the server's operating system permissions won't let you set the logging folder as writable so that logs can actually be written.

Thanks for the prompt reply - that makes a lot of sense and I can rest easier knowing I don't have 50+ errors on every paypal action. I've got it set to log only now, no email.