Nico's blog

Fixing notmuch's issue with Xapian exception

Context

I use notmuch a lot, in combination with Mutt.

Recently, notmuch stopped working and indexing new emails, with that error message:

notmuch A Xapian exception occurred at lib/message.cc:1209: No termlist
for document 290872

As I was busy, I didn't spent too much time on it - just a few searches that didn't return any result.

Yesterday, as I really needed to find an email, I looked at it a bit more seriously, and found that email thread on the Debian bugs mailing list.
While it didn't solve my issue, it made me realise that there was a simple step I could try: rename notmuch's database, and relaunch notmuch so that it rebuilds it from scratch.

Fixing the issue

• I renamed ~/mail/.notmuch/xapian to something else
• then I launched notmuch new which took a while to complete
• but once done, I no longer had issues, and I can now search again all my emails with notmuch! <3

Wrap Up

As usual - just come back to the basics!
Since notmuch uses a database and my issue seemed to be with a specific element in that database, rebuilding it seemed like a sensible approach - and it was, since it now works again.

Tags: IT