On a general note related to Akonadi performance: on my 4.1x system I always restart it manually in a more or less dedicated terminal window after logging in. That's to see when connection problems arise (and thus know when I better restart it rather than blame KMail for glitches).
Akonadi can use up quite a bit of CPU when it starts syncing multiple accounts so nowadays I do `nice akonadictl restart`. That leaves just the fan noise as a real indication that I'm probably getting new email.
One thing that's annoying with this scheme is that KMail has absolutely no visual feedback when you move among messages with the cursor keys. The devs seem to assume that fetching and displaying the next message is instantaneous and enough feedback in itself, but in practice this is of course not the case. Result: I often end up browsing several messages farther (it doesn't help that my cursor key strokes tend not to register very well).
Claws has a "Stop All" toolbar button that activates when the app is working. It'd be nice if KMail had this too.
R.
