Mailchimp addListMember reports client error 400 Bad Request when already exists

Question

I'm using the MailchimpMarketing\ApiClient() writer resource to add a basic Mailchimp subscription form to the website. Adding a user seems to be working fine, but when trying to add an already existing user, I'm expecting just a nice json response so that I can catch that error and display it to the user, but I'm getting the following GuzzleHttp\Exception\ClientException ：

Client error: `POST https://us10.api.mailchimp.com/3.0/lists/xxxxxxxxxx/members` resulted in a `400 Bad Request` response:
{"type":"http://developer.mailchimp.com/documentation/mailchimp/guides/error-glossary/","title":"Member Exists","status" (truncated...)

The documentation doesn't really seem to explain much, I also have to find the right way to catch errors on stack overflow because the Mailchimps documentation is... lacking! This is the code:

try {
    $response = $mailchimp->lists->addListMember($this->settings_helper->get('mailchimp_list_id'), [
        "email_address" => $form->get_field_value('email'),
        "status" => "subscribed",
        "merge_fields" => [
            "FNAME" => $first_name,
            "LNAME" => $last_name
         ]
    ]);
    
    if ($response->getId()) {
        $this->add_json_success($this->settings_helper->get('mailchimp_success_message'));
    }
} catch (MailchimpMarketing\ApiException $e) {
    $errors[] = $e->getMessage();
} catch (ClientErrorResponseException $e) {
    $errors[] = $e->getMessage();
} catch (GuzzleHttp\Exception\ClientException $e) {
    $errors[] = $e->getMessage();
}

This is the mailchimp documentation I use: https://mailchimp.com/developer/api/marketing/list-members/add-member-to-list/

I could catch the 400 error code and output a custom error, but I'm sure I must be doing something wrong to get such a useless response from the Mailchimp API?

Thanks a lot, Andy, for all the help.

Answer 1

I had the same problem so I ended up indicating the error message by changing the last catch clause to the following to see the entire error:

catch (GuzzleHttp\Exception\ClientException $e) {
  echo '
' . var_export($e->getResponse()->getBody()->getContents()).'
';
$errors[] = $e->getMessage();
}

This reveals the following bad error, which has been truncated so far:

{
    "type":"http://developer.mailchimp.com/documentation/mailchimp/guides/error-glossary/",
    "title":"Invalid Resource",
    "status":400,
    "detail":"Isabell_Murazik@example.com looks fake or invalid, please enter a real email address.",
    "instance":"fcc1d762-2475-40a6-bc7f-4ac7f3fb7902"
}

So, my question is @example.com looks fake or invalid...

Tried different emails, even @test.com worked. I can't guarantee you that this will be your problem as well, but checking the error details is definitely a good first step!