It is kmail Version 1.11.2. Not running KDE as a DTE - though I have in the past. I seem to have got rid of the most brain dead features now, except that for some crazed reason when you pass the mouse over the folder pane, it insists on delivering you a popup that tells you what each folder is, in case you had suffered from memory loss since the last time you did it. But of course, preventing you from seeing half the pane. This is maddening but just about manageable as long as its limited to that pane.
The developers of this thing should be forced to use it as shipped for a few months, it would be enormously educational for them.
This was a true Victor Meldrew moment. Another one happened in the ongoing process of this upgrade to sqeeze. Imagine this. You are running Gnome perfectly happily but notice some oddities here and there. Like for instance the screensave appears to be disconnected, and you get xsession errors about themes not being installed.
So you try dpkg-reconfigure, and are told that Gnome is not installed!
"I don't believe it!" you cry, before you can stop yourself.
Peter