Suddenly Cron wasn’t running my mail script; I verified that the script itself was still working, so than I began the venture into the unknown: how to debug Cron? Serverfault has a good answer. Everything seemed to checkout, and I verified that it was working to write to a tmp file. The file was being written. Finally, by removing the line that smothers output to /dev/null I was able to find the problem: the need for an absolute path name (as evidently the Cron user couldn’t run getmail without a full path).

https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/55125/newsticker-failure-wrong-type-argument-listp/55126 Suddenly newsticker is failing to load. I get the following stack trace on error. I have made no recent upgrades. Debugger entered–Lisp error: (wrong-type-argument listp \.\.\.) newsticker–stat-num-items(Bus\ Driver\ Diaries new immortal) apply(newsticker–stat-num-items Bus\ Driver\ Diaries (new immortal)) newsticker–stat-num-items-for-group(Bus\ Driver\ Diaries new immortal) newsticker–treeview-tree-get-tag(“Bus Driver Diaries” nil “feeds-4”) #f(compiled-function (g) #<bytecode 0x2370c3d>)(“Bus Driver Diaries”) mapcar(#f(compiled-function (g) #<bytecode 0x2370c3d>) (“Sacha Chua” “Good Questions” “Quote of the day” “Tory C Anderson” “Bus Driver Diaries” “Dadacity” “Austen Knows Best” “Every Day Miracles” “Vi Hart” “Brain Pickings” “Inside Clojure” “Reddit Clojure” “Reddit Emacs” “Reddit Postgres” “Reddit Programming Languages”))