Postie category/title works for all but one post

Background: after solving the issue of duplicate post (turns out it’s a WordPress “feature”), and using the CLI or post editor on my site to delete the old post(s) and then use Postie to send the new one(s), everything seemed to be working perfectly…until last night.

I ran into this last night while trying to post a “Daily Sales” post. Every other post I did using Postie worked beautifully – the category and post title in the Subject line were recognized and applied. But not for this post – Postie says there is no Subject line.

Here is the header I put in the posts that worked (note that all of these are created by a script using two variables: $category and $title):

From: mymainemail.com
Subject: [Patriotic] US Air Force

And this is the header I used for the Daily Sales post that doesn’t work (gets put into the default category and the title is (no title):

From: mymainemail.com
Subject: [Other] Daily Sales

I also tried this one … same result:

From: mymainemail.com
Subject: Other: Daily Sales

The posts that work are either posts full of product listings with lots of javascript, css, and html, or banner pages for some merchants, with mostly just a few lines of html per banner.

The post that didn’t work last night was just a few lines of html/css for each sale ad. As I mentioned above, Postie says there is no subject line at all. I checked the post that I was sending, and there was a subject line, just like the above. I tried putting the category and title in the body of the post – both before and after the :start (not sure which way that’s supposed to go, so I tried both). It was ignored if I put it immediately below the :start and status: Publish lines, and if I put it above the :start line, it resulted in a post in the default category (wrong category), a title of “tmptitle”, and was a Draft post only.

I’m so confused by this I don’t even know what to try next. One thing I did try last night, just to make sure nothing had changed with email security between my Mac and the my hosting site, was to re-post one that had worked correctly – and it worked correctly again (as a duplicate of the original … again, a WP “feature”).

Does anyone have any suggestions on why the first version would work with all of the others, and not the “Daily Sales” post? Again, with the exception of trying to figure out where to put the category/title inside the post, the messages for all posts are generated by a script.

Thanks,
Jim Graham

PS: please excuse any typos or spelling errors—it’s caused by damage to my brain from my first cancer, which included, in the second metastasis, 3 brain tumors, and if I don’t feel it while I type, I probably won’t see it, either.