It really seems that the kde team have taken leave of their senses. I just upgraded to squeeze in the continuing effort to deal with xsession errors - they have changed now in kind, but there are still a bunch of them - one side effect of which was to update kmail.

The thing now comes with two 'features' which seem designed to destroy usability, and no guide on how to get rid of the things. One is that messages are separated by day and week, with drop down tabs. Why anyone would want this is a mystery. It makes scrolling through your old messages just about impossible. The other is that wherever you move the mouse these crazed popups appear, to obscure whatever you were looking at. This was probably put in in case you should persist in trying to scroll through, and make it doubly impossible!

A bit of google searching revealed an obscure button and a setting deep in the bowels of the thing which let you turn them both off and get back to something that looks like a normal email client. But really, what on earth has happened to these guys? Kmail used to be, out of the box, a nice simple email client packaged with a quite decent calendar. You can still get back to that, but you have to make an effort.

Al