my_backup — notification email investigation + log-timestamp fix

Date: 2026-07-18 Dept: IT

What happened

Talbot hadn’t seen the weekly Sunday 9am my_backup status-report email recently, and logs/send_status_report.log had no timestamps on its lines (couldn’t tell how stale it was from content alone). Surfaced as a side-thread of the Ideas-Workflow P4 Medium-digest work, which was also hitting AUTHENTICATIONFAILED on IMAP using the same app password.

Findings

• Cron scheduling was never broken — Sunday 9am job ran on schedule (job_monitor heartbeat confirmed last run 2026-07-12 succeeded). 2026-07-18 was a Saturday, so there was no missed run to explain yet.
• The 07-12 email genuinely was sent and genuinely was received — just buried in Promotions/Spam, not lost. Confirmed by Talbot’s own Gmail search.
• The app password is fine. The Medium script’s IMAP AUTHENTICATIONFAILED is a separate, protocol-specific issue (IMAP, not SMTP) — left open under the Ideas-Workflow P4 task, not this one.
• send_status_report.py was calling plain print() — cron’s >> redirect adds no timestamp layer, so every log line was undated. Fixed with a log() helper prefixing [YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS], matching backup.log’s existing convention.

Resolution

• Fixed and committed: my_backup repo commit c2bec46 (src/my_backup/send_status_report.py only).
• Verified live: Talbot ran uv run send_status_report manually 2026-07-18 — sent successfully, 7 pCloud-skip warnings (expected, pCloud disabled), 0 failures, log lines now timestamped.
• General lesson promoted to GlobalDevRules.md §3.9 (WSL + AI Utility Gotchas): cron >> redirects don’t timestamp — scripts must do it themselves.

Open (not part of this task)

• Gmail filter (subject:my_backup → labeled folder) to prevent future weekly reports landing in Promotions — noted, no task created yet.
• Medium script’s IMAP AUTHENTICATIONFAILED — tracked under Ideas-Workflow P4, same app password, different protocol.

Full history: see git log for Core/IT/Tasks/my_backup-notification-email-investigation.md (task file purged/closed same session).