Serious instability in KMail

[Bruce Miller <brmiller@rogers.com>]

KMail 1.6.1 running under KDE3.2 (experimental) has suddenly become 
seriously unstable. Rebooting to a more conservative installation on 
the same computer (Libranet 2.8 using KDE 3.1.5 and KMail 1.5.4, but 
sharing the same /home directory) has not so far alleviated the 
problems.

Problem 1: Selecting a mesage with the mouse damages the text. Selecting 
the message reduces the name, sender and date to Unkown. It does not 
appear to shorten the message. I believe --- but am not sure --- that 
if I move the message to another folder, the entire message might be 
recovered.

This morning, there were only about 20 messages in my Inbox. With the 
creation of duplicate messages and loss of headers, more have been 
created.

Problem 2: Attempting to apply filters manually to the inbox causes 
KMail to crash instantly. My default mail handling is to download all 
messages to the inbox. I scan the message list quickly and then do a 
Select All| Filter.

Problem 3: If I inadvertently hit Ctrl-J (apply filters manually) while 
in a large mailing list directly (one mailing list has 18,000 
messages), hundreds, in one case, thousands of duplicates are created. 
I use KMail's default maildir format. Is there some reasonably 
straightforward way to identify and delete these duplicates.

Problem 4: Kmail frequently ceases responding when I attempt to send a 
message. I do not store passwords and therefore always enter them when 
prompted when I first load KMail. Similarly, my ISP uses authentication 
for sending messages, and I must therefore enter the password again 
every time I send a message. KMail frequently hangs for several 
minutes, sometimes permanently before the password screen comes up.

This is the first message that I have attempted to send since rebooting 
to the more conservative setup. Until I have a better fix on what I 
need to do to restabilize the mail store, I would ask that you copy 
replies to a WebMail accout where I can access them without using 
KMail. The address is brmiller0423 AT yahoodotcountry. The country code 
is ca.