Dear notmuch developers,
I'll start with a short description of how I encountered the bug, so my report is more understandable and also so that you can potentially direct me to other places where the bug actually resides (I am a bit skeptic I would find a bug in such a popular open source project as notmuch is).

I use Lieer https://github.com/gauteh/lieer to sync my maildir and nm database with Gmail. When I send a reply, Lieer checks whether the subject matches the original one and prints a warning otherwise (Google presumably knows better what a thread is and breaks it if the subject is different). The relevant snippet is:

if 'In-Reply-To' in eml:
 repl = eml['In-Reply-To'].strip().strip('<>')
 self.vprint("looking for original message: %s" % repl)
 with notmuch2.Database(mode = notmuch2.Database.MODE.READ_ONLY) as db:
   try:
     nmsg = db.find(repl)
   except LookupError:
     nmsg = None
   if nmsg is not None:
     (_, gids) = self.local.messages_to_gids([nmsg])
     if nmsg.header('Subject') != eml['Subject']:
       self.vprint ("warning: subject does not match, might not be able to associate 
with existing thread.")

But there is a catch: when the original message's subject is empty, the check fails with a LookupError. Stack trace follows. I use NixOS, so while the file paths are weird, they also guarantee reproducible package set.

Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "/nix/store/9l521wrzalkhqk46qn57z0wc5lnmdzwk-lieer-1.4/bin/.gmi-wrapped", line 
25, in <module>
   g.main ()
 File 
"/nix/store/9l521wrzalkhqk46qn57z0wc5lnmdzwk-lieer-1.4/lib/python3.10/site-packages/lieer/gmailieer.py",
 line 230, in main
   args.func (args)
 File 
"/nix/store/9l521wrzalkhqk46qn57z0wc5lnmdzwk-lieer-1.4/lib/python3.10/site-packages/lieer/gmailieer.py",
 line 837, in send
   if nmsg.header('Subject') != eml['Subject']:
 File 
"/nix/store/y12m0r41lcwz1ksqs6gncra0djln92cj-python3.10-notmuch2-0.37/lib/python3.10/site-packages/notmuch2/_message.py",
 line 266, in header
   raise LookupError

At first, this sounds reasonable: the subject is empty, so it is effectively missing. That would indicate a bug in Lieer itself and would be fixed by a try-catch block. Notmuch's source for Message.header, however, states:

:returns: The header value, an empty string if the header is not present.
:rtype: str

This makes an impression that no error should be raised and a harmless value (at least for the above-mentioned code) should be returned. Yet the docs continue with

:raises LookupError: if the header is not present.

completely contradicting itself.

And so here the questions:
Is my confusion justified? What is the expected nm's behavior? Can we fix the docs and possible the implementation?

Thank you all for reading this long report and for your dedication to open source,
Vojta Káně

p.s. I am not subscribed to the mailing list, so please keep me in the replies.
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