Last weekend I was quite happy as I didn't receive almost any spam message and this is quite uncommon for me as I still haven't got the time to set up a spam message filter. Then I sent something to a mailing list and didn't get it (I'm suscribed to that mailing list). Then my cousing told me she had sent me something the day before. Then I started to feel I was loosing emails.
First step, don't panic. Next step, log in into the mail server and check some logs. It seemed that the mails were being accepted by the mailserver but never came to my inbox. I started to blame my new Evolution 2.0 since I just installed last weekend and so I enter in the #evolution irc channel.
I was pretty amazed on how fast these guys told me what the problem was: something in my ~/.procmailrc was wrong. First of all I'll describe the problem. It seemed that some of the mail I got (the one being lost) wast getting stored in a very strange file called & (yes, an ampersand) in the ~/Maildir/ folder. I open the .procmailrc and saw the offending line:
& * ^(From|Cc|to).*desktop-devel-list@gnome.org .gnome/
Obviously the & should be replaced by :0: . Everything has a logic explanation after all.
Python circular module dependencies
Or the Python Holy Grial, as I like to call it. You have a file called a.py and then a file called b.py and you need something in a.py from b.py and viceversa. Isn't it quite common? Well, with Python this is a gotcha, one of the very few I have managed to find after a few years programming in this language.