Testing with same email

Hello @sedelstein,

You have come to the right place – I’ve tested subscribing extensively over the past couple of weeks ??

To begin, you’re getting the “You’re already subscribed” message because of your opt-in settings (here is a quick article explaining them https://yikesplugins.com/support/knowledge-base/opt-in-settings/). If you’d like to re-subscribe without having to delete yourself, you could choose “Update Existing Subscriber: Yes” and “Send Update Email: No.” You can then subscribe as many times as you’d like and it will update your MailChimp subscriber profile (this is not the same thing as re-subscribing).

If you’d like to re-subscribe, you’ll need to delete your subscriber profile from MailChimp and re-subscribe as normal (if you unsubscribe instead of delete, MailChimp will not allow you to re-subscribe as easily). MailChimp will only let you do this a handful of times before they flag your email address as having signed up too many times.

I would suggest signing up with test email accounts and deleting them from MailChimp if you’d like to test the original submission/subscription workflow.

Cheers,
Kevin.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 1 month ago by yikesitskevin.
• This reply was modified 8 years, 1 month ago by yikesitskevin.

Hello again @sedelstein,

I may have misinterpreted your question. If you’ve deleted your subscriber profile from the correct list in MailChimp, then you shouldn’t receive the “You’re already subscribed” message. There is no caching for this type of thing – we’re communicating directly with MailChimp to determine if the email address is currently subscribed or not. Please make sure you’ve deleted the correct email address from the correct list in MailChimp!

Hope that helps,
Kevin.

Kevin, first, thank you for your prompt and informative replies. It makes a world of difference. I made the changes you described and that seems to have resolved the problem I was having.

No problem @sedelstein – I’m glad it’s resolved – have a good day / night. ??

I have a similar issue. I have ensured that the two emails I am testing with have been removed from the relevant Mailchimp list (in MC). Even if I enter completely unique names in the form on our website I always get that these emails are already subscribers. Not true of course. If I allow the form to Update Existing Subscriber it subscribes me to the list without the double opt-in confirmation which is required for the list and even though the opt-in settings for that form are double opt-in. You can trial it here: https://moxiefuture.com/subscribe-to-newsletter/. FYI I am also using the Mailchimp Plugin – is there any conflict?

Hello @tauraedgar,

First – sorry for the issues.

Second – I don’t believe there are any conflicts between Easy Forms and the MailChimp plugin (do you mean MailChimp.com’s official plugin?).

Third – Can you let me know what settings are currently set for your form? I will test it out from my end now.

Kevin.

Hello again @tauraedgar,

Using the form on your site, I was able to successfully receive the double opt-in for three new emails. I noticed that if I try to subscribe again (before confirming via the double opt-in email), I receive the message: “The email you entered is already a subscriber to this list.”

Let me know if that helps,
Kevin.

thanks @yikesitskevin for your quick reply. that’s the behaviour i want to stop … the issue of being told you’re subscribed but you’re not really. why is is storing the email on the plugin side rather than actually checking the MC list? it will prevent people who haven’t completed subscription to try again (imagine they lost the email or never received it for some other reason).

[FYI yes I meant the official MC plugin which I will probably stop using if I can get yours working the way I’d like;)]

Hi @tauraedgar,

Sorry if I was unclear – we are not storing the submitted emails on the plugin’s side. It is the default MailChimp behavior that users who have received the double opt-in email will not receive it again when trying to subscribe (that is, MailChimp is telling the plugin “this user has already subscribed” when in reality, they should be telling us “this user has not subscribed, but has received the double opt-in email already”). I will look at the specific MailChimp response to confirm they’re no indicators that a user has received the double opt-in email but hasn’t subscribed. I’ll let you know what I find, but as far as I know, this is the default MailChimp behavior.

Cheers,
Kevin.

Hello again @tauraedgar,

I’ve looked at the requests and responses between the plugin and MailChimp. There is a flag that a user has already received the double opt-in email, so in future versions we could use that flag and display a custom message for this scenario. However, I’m unable to get MailChimp to re-send the double opt-in email. I emailed MailChimp asking them how to re-send the double opt-in email, so I’ll get back to you with that.

Additionally, I’ll make a ticket on our to-do list to add the specific message for double opt-in resubscribers. That would be a nice feature to have regardless of what MailChimp tells us. At the least, we can let the user know they already have a double opt-in email and that they can search for it in their inbox. We’re pretty busy over here so I’d expect this feature to be included in a release in about 3-4 weeks time.

I hope that’s helpful,
Kevin.

thanks again @yikesitskevin – appreciate your fast full answers! so here’s the next weird step. on our site the footer signup is using the official MC plugin. as long as i don’t click confirm in the double opt-in email, i can submit over and over again and sometimes still get a new double opt-in email. they only stop once i’ve actually joined the list. I did it again just now and saw this message from MC in the JS: Success, you’ve been signed up! Please look for our confirmation email.

if i use their form to sign up with an email address that i know is already subscribed the JS message is “Success, you’ve been signed up.”

What I want to avoid is that you enter your email once but maybe forget or can’t find the opt-in email then you can never sign yourself up again!

Hello again @tauraedgar,

Can you explain what you mean by “i can submit over and over again and sometimes still get a new double opt-in email”? So you’re not receiving the email every time? Does there seem to be any specific pattern as to when you’re receiving successive double opt-in emails?

Regardless, that means it’s possible for MailChimp to re-send the double opt-in email, which means we’re doing something incorrectly in our plugin. I am actively communicating with the MailChimp team to understand the process of sending and re-sending double opt-in emails. I’ll let you know when I have more info.

Kevin.

Hi @tauraedgar,

The MailChimp support team got back to me regarding double opt-in emails not re-sending:

unfortunately this behavior is unexpected but is something our developers are aware of. They are currently working to pinpoint the cause of the issue and push out a fix

So I’m not sure how the MailChimp plugin is doing it (maybe it’s related to the “sometimes” issue).

Kevin.

@yikesitskevin thanks again for your good feedback. So today I spent 3 hours on a chat with MC. I think the main issue is the one they admitted to you as well. For now I’ve turned off the double optin for your plugin, the MC official plugin and the optin monster overlay and we seem to be getting good results as long as the email address has never been sent an optin email before. Not idea but better than nothing. They gave me a ticket number to follow up.

Alyssa
After that test, I was looking at the logging for the signup form, and it looks like if the same email address is submitted more than once to get a confirmation email, confirmation emails after the first send won’t be triggered. So, if it’s brand new subscriber, then they will get that first confirmation email, but if they try to resignup the 2nd email will not go through. I just checked that we do have this issue in the works with our developers, so I’ll send off these test examples to our developers. I can totally understand how this may not be ideal, but I would recommend to all subscribers to make sure to whitelist or add us to their safe sender’s list.

Hey @tauraedgar,

Agh, it sounds like we’re on the same page now. As I said before, we have an open ticket to add a custom message for people who try to subscribe when they’ve already received the double opt-in email. Along with that work, we’ll set up the subscription process in a way that should allow re-sending of the double opt-in email once MailChimp sorts their part out.

I’m glad we got some answers on this problem; this was a productive discussion. Thanks for working with us :-).

Cheers,
Kevin.