403 Forbidden

My site, tribeoflambs.com, is a web store using the Mailchimp for WordPress plugin. For 6 months everything was working fine, my site is hosted on Godaddy’s Managed WordPress hosting and I have a standard SSL cert from Godaddy as well. 2 Weeks ago, around the time that WP v4.4.1 came out, the Mailchimp plugin stopped connecting to the Mailchimp API server…this is the error message: “The MailChimp API server returned the following response: 403 Forbidden.”

I chatted with Mailchimp and they said my IP was blocked, which is strange because I had an SSL which comes with a dedicated IP. By their recommendation I revoked my SSL and purchased a new one. After 24 hours of DNS propagation I was able to connect again to the Mailchimp API.

A week later the same error message and I can’t connect again. I chat with Mailchimp who are completely stumped. I talk to Godaddy on the phone for 2 hours and they are stumped too. My hosting comes with a 1 click staging area, so I pushed the live web store to the staging and tried to connect from the staging side, interestingly it connects right away. There are two differences between the live and the staging, the staging has no SSL and as such has no dedicated IP. Either the dedicated IP is being blacklisted or somehow the Mailchimp for WP plugin won’t connect over https.

I don’t really know what to do, neither does Mailchimp and neither does Godaddy. I could move the entire site over to new a new hosting provider, and also purchase a new SSL, but I would prefer to get help from the plugin author if I can.

Here are the results from this test curl -v https://us1.api.mailchimp.com/3.0/?apikey=test

-bash-4.2$ curl -v https://us1.api.mailchimp.com/3.0/?apikey=test
*   Trying 23.212.33.79...
* Connected to us1.api.mailchimp.com (23.212.33.79) port 443 (#0)
* Cipher selection: ALL:!EXPORT:!EXPORT40:!EXPORT56:!aNULL:!LOW:!RC4:@STRENGTH
* successfully set certificate verify locations:
*   CAfile: /etc/pki/tls/certs/ca-bundle.crt
  CApath: none
* TLSv1.2 (OUT), TLS handshake, Client hello (1):
* TLSv1.2 (IN), TLS handshake, Server hello (2):
* NPN, negotiated HTTP1.1
* TLSv1.2 (IN), TLS handshake, Certificate (11):
* TLSv1.2 (IN), TLS handshake, Server key exchange (12):
* TLSv1.2 (IN), TLS handshake, Server finished (14):
* TLSv1.2 (OUT), TLS handshake, Client key exchange (16):
* TLSv1.2 (OUT), TLS change cipher, Client hello (1):
* TLSv1.2 (OUT), TLS handshake, Unknown (67):
* TLSv1.2 (OUT), TLS handshake, Finished (20):
* TLSv1.2 (IN), TLS change cipher, Client hello (1):
* TLSv1.2 (IN), TLS handshake, Finished (20):
* SSL connection using TLSv1.2 / ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256
* Server certificate:
*        subject: C=US; ST=GA; L=Atlanta; O=ROCKET SCIENCE GROUP; OU=Rocket Scie                                          nce Group; CN=*.api.mailchimp.com
*        start date: Sep 22 14:39:14 2015 GMT
*        expire date: Sep 22 14:39:13 2016 GMT
*        subjectAltName: us1.api.mailchimp.com matched
*        issuer: C=NL; L=Amsterdam; O=Verizon Enterprise Solutions; OU=Cybertrus                                          t; CN=Verizon Akamai SureServer CA G14-SHA2
*        SSL certificate verify ok.
> GET /3.0/?apikey=test HTTP/1.1
> Host: us1.api.mailchimp.com
> User-Agent: curl/7.45.0
> Accept: */*
>
< HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized
< Server: nginx
< Content-Type: application/problem+json; charset=utf-8
< Content-Length: 233
< X-Request-Id: debd7c6c-796f-4301-87a2-f50ff06e8a3d
< Link: <https://us1.api.mailchimp.com/schema/3.0/ProblemDetailDocument.json>; r                                          el="describedBy"
< Date: Sun, 17 Jan 2016 16:36:18 GMT
< Connection: keep-alive
< Set-Cookie: _AVESTA_ENVIRONMENT=prod; path=/
<
* Connection #0 to host us1.api.mailchimp.com left intact
{"type":"https://developer.mailchimp.com/documentation/mailchimp/guides/error-glossary/","title":"API Key Invalid","status":401,"detail":"Your API key may be inv                                          alid, or you've attempted to access the wrong datacenter.","instance":""}-bash-4 -bash-4.2$

This is the OpenSSL version: `-bash-4.2$ openssl version
OpenSSL 1.0.1e-fips 11 Feb 2013`

Any ideas? Help from anybody would be appreciated!

Cheers,
Zach

https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/mailchimp-for-wp/