Yii: Unique e-mail address in rules validation not working - yii

Question

I built a form that displays a user's existing email, then asks for a new email and a confirmation email to assure that they've typed it in correctly. The field for the new email is 'new_email', the confirmation field is 'new_email_confirm'. The model already has the field 'email' where their existing email address is stored. The scenario used is 'change_email'. Every other rule works and is validating with errors in my model but this one...when I enter in the exact same email/confirm that's already taken in 'email' I don't get an error, it is allowed to save.
In rules, I have added the following:
array(
'new_email,new_email_confirm',
'required',
'message'=>'This is a required field',
'on'=>'change_email',
),
array(
'new_email',
'email',
'message'=>'Invalid email address',
'on'=>'change_email',
),
array(
'new_email',
'compare',
'compareAttribute'=>'new_email_confirm',
'message'=>"Emails don't match",
'on'=>'change_email',
),
array(
'new_email',
'unique',
'className'=>'User',
'attributeName'=>'email',
'on'=>'change_email',
),
What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

I have two dirty suggestions to do this, since I am not able to find out what the exact problem is.
1- write a custom validation for uniqueness and remove the unique rule:
array('new_email','customValidationRule'),
and write it like below:
public function customValidationRule(){
//after all validation rules
if(!$this->hasErrors()){
$check=User::model()->findByAttributes(array('email'=>$this->new_email)); //or $this->new_email_confirm
if(!is_null($check) || !empty($check)){
$this->addError('new_email','The new email has been already taken by other!');
}
}
}
2- replace new_email with new_email_confirm in your unique rule.