Notmuch success: Xapian database corrupt

[John Fremlin]

First off, thanks for making notmuch, it's a really good idea and it
works generally very well.

Running notmuch new, it processes mails nicely for a while 

Processed 58 files (19 files/sec.)

then after crunching through not many emails

terminate called after throwing an instance of 'Xapian::DatabaseCorruptError'
Aborted (core dumped)

Is there any way to recover the database? Notmuch search works well and
it takes absolutely ages (one or two days) to add my mail to it; and I
would suspect that it might happen again . . . I'm on Ubuntu lucid with
an Intel SSD.