David Bremner <david@tethera.net> writes:

> Andy Wills <home@willslab.co.uk> writes:
>
>>
>> andy@andy-x200:~/work/talks/2017/icps$ notmuch new 
>> Processed 230 total files in 7s (29 files/sec.).
>> Added 212 new messages to the database. Removed 85 messages. Detected 18 file renames.
>> Error: A Xapian exception occurred flushing database: Value in posting list too large.
>>
>> ...and it seems that, since I've been getting this error, new emails
>> are not reliably being found by, for example M-x notmuch in emacs.
>>
>
> Hi Andy;
>
> What version of notmuch is that? From the error message it sounds
> pre-2014. That particular code was rewritten in notmuch 0.19, so if my
> guess is correct it might be fixed by newer notmuch.

The other generic advice is to run 'xapian-check' to check your database
for corruption. On Debian and derivatives (e.g. Ubuntu) this is in the
package 'xapian-tools'.