Mailchimp API status 200 for members who are already subscribed - mailchimp

Question

The following code is working and subscribing new members successfully. However, the status returns 200 even if the email address is already subscribed. I have checked that $member_id is hashing correctly, and despite identical values it still returns 200.
$result = array(
'status' => sync_mailchimp($data)
);
var_dump($result) // 200
function sync_mailchimp($data) {
// Setup our Mailchimp info
$api_key = 'xxxxx';
$list_id = 'ab8abde5bb';
$member_id = md5(strtolower($data['email'])); // lowercase hash of the email
$datacenter = 'us16';
$url = 'https://' . $datacenter . '.api.mailchimp.com/3.0/lists/' . $list_id . '/members/' . $member_id;
$json = json_encode([
'email_address' => $data['email'],
'status' => $data['status']
]);
// Send via curl
$ch = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERPWD, 'user:' . $api_key);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, ['Content-Type: application/json']);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 10);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, 'PUT');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $json);
$result = curl_exec($ch);
$httpcode = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
curl_close($ch);
return $httpcode;
}

Answer 1

I was also having the same issue while using a similar snippet.
Reading the MailChimp API 3.0 docs relating to managing subscribers (specifically the section Subscribe an Address), it was clear that this method was not the correct way to add a new subscriber.
The request type needs to be a POST
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, 'POST');
and must be sent to the endpoint
https://<data_center>.api.mailchimp.com/3.0/lists/<list_id>/members/
The request body containing the JSON is identical.
The response code will be 200 when an email address is added to the list successfully, and 400 when the email address already exists on the list.
Note that this method will not work for updating an existing subscriber – to do that, the request type must be PATCH, and you must use the original endpoint ending with the hashed email address.