It's not just kmail IMO, despite being on gnome I enjoyed using Amarok up to version 1.4, it was a bit heavy but I liked some of the content and smartplaylist features and it did a reasonable job of helping me search and manage my collection, so I put up with the bloatedness.
Then along comes amarok2 which has the worst user interface I think I have ever encountered http://amarok.kde.org/files/Amarok-2_0_0-Magnatune.png
Is this sort of UI the global standard KDE is moving towards..because it seems hopelessly broken to me.
There are so many different types of UI elements there it gives me a headache just looking at it. Buttons don't look like buttons, the interface is overly busy and wastes so much space around the menubar I wonder what size screen the UI developer was targeting because even with a window size of 1024x786 many things like album names get chopped.
I am not sure what sort of deranged mind decided to put the track position bar at the very top (and make it 2 foot long) and then the currently playing track info at the very bottom when due to the over sized and silly navigation buttons there is acres of wasted space above the bar. Add to this the even slower behavior and I had to hunt down a replacement.
Phew...rant over...it is good to vent sometimes.
Ultimately I am glad this happened because I discovered that ario/mpd pretty much does what I want (although to be fair it is a subset of Amarok in functionality..but most of the lost functions are ones I didn't use anyway) and at least running here is much much more responsive.