American Express broken

[jantman]

I've been using ofxclient to download my American Express card transactions daily since 2017-03-07 at the same time every day (approximately 02:41 Eastern / 06:41 GMT). I'd only had 2 problems previously. On 2019-05-25 this stopped working for me, with the AmEx server returning a HTTP 403 Forbidden, and I haven't been able to get it to work since. I've tried various combinations of Accept header, APPVER and OFX VERSION, to no avail.

Is anyone else using this for AmEx, and can either confirm or refute this issue?

[jantman]

I just got off the phone with AmEx technical support and managed to speak with a supervisor. I was told that while they only officially support Quicken and Quickbooks, they can confirm that they've had quite a few customers reporting 403 errors lately via OFX Direct Connect in those products, and they have people working on it. Their current recommendation is to disconnect and reconnect your finance app and try again, and if that doesn't work, try again in a few days...

[q3aiml]

I ran into this as well. It might be a coincidence but it started working for me again after setting the accept header to text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8. Yeah, odd.

[jantman]

Hmm, interesting. I hadn't tried that.

After battling with this for a few days, I signed up for a free development account with Plaid ( see https://plaid.com/products/transactions and https://plaid.com/docs/quickstart/ ) and wrote a simple client using their API. Given how well it's working, I may end up abandoning all of my OFX scripts in favor of it...

[shawkinaw]

@q3aiml Nice tip! My AMEX OFX downloads have been broken for weeks, that fixed it for me. For anyone else who wants to do this, just add the following to your ofxclient.ini file for your AMEX account:

institution.client_args.accept = text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8

[ds17f]

As of 7/4/2020 this fix worked to make my amex calls function. I pasted exactly what @shawkinaw provided.