Bugs, issues, quirks in Mailchimp's API

I thought it would be useful to document these.

No sandbox

If Mailchimp offered a sandbox account - that worked like a normal one except for actually sending mail, development would be a lot easier. But instead, everything must be done with real email addresses and real paid-for services. This has several risks and pitfalls: accidents can be costly and testing email addresses can trigger security alerts ("foo@example.com" has subscirbed too much recently, request denied). Data cannot be properly deleted; if you delete an email address it is stored as deleted for the purposes of remembering to never use it again. This means you need an infinite source of dummy addresses for testing.

Member IDs

These are supposed to be md5(strtolower("contact@example.com")), however if you have a very old list (not entirely sure, possibly pre-2015) then you may have invalid IDs because mailchimp set the id without lower-casing it first, and now you can't change that so you have no way with the API to make updates.

Also, there's the issue that lowercase is (a) destructive because the localpart of the email address can be case-sensitive and (b) has different implementations based on character sets (strtolower vs mb_strtolower for example).

Incomplete API documentation.

e.g. the PUT lists/{listID}/members/{memberID} method is completely undocumented.

The documentation is at https://mailchimp.com/developer/reference/lists/list-members/

This page mentions PUT https://mailchimp.com/developer/guides/get-started-with-mailchimp-api-3/#_HTTP_Methods

This page has a section about create/update but does not mention PUT! https://mailchimp.com/developer/guides/manage-subscribers-with-the-mailchimp-api/#Create_or_Update_a_Contact

Over chat I received this:

I checked with the team and from my understanding that PUT /lists/{list_id}/members/{subscriber_hash} should work as it has, but looks like the document was removed - I do't know if that was intentional or not but I did pass along some feedback on that

Batch update API

You can download responses to batch updates by a request to a special URL.

This downloads a gzipped tar file. However the format of the tar file is incompatible with PHP's phar class (which normally opens tar files OK) since the tar file begins with defining the current directory ./

I believe it should start with either no directory, or a named relative one, like response/.

This means that I had to write a custom class to handle this tar format.

Fetch since

If you set a very old date for fetching members updated 'since', e.g. 1970, the API seems to just hang, even with tiny lists that don't have much history.