kmail has become essentially unusable

I just stopped it, reinstalled everything kmail related in a synaptic search, and restarted it from the tde menu. It immediately reported two bad indices, for folders emc and spam-hold, and took 32 minutes to scan those 2 folders and open its gui. I own as gene:gene with perms from 600 to 644 in the /home/gene/Mail subdir. It is NOT updating now for 4 days, the files in /home/gene/Mail/emc/cur to indicate read or important by appending the ':2,S' or ':2,RS' but it is generating new indices, 2 of them everytime it tries to scan that folder, so it CAN create/write to that folder. There are around 60100 messages in that folder, and the indice files are drwxr-xr-x 5 gene gene 4096 Mar 31 12:08 emc -rw------- 1 gene gene 44551163 Mar 31 12:08 .emc.index -rw-r--r-- 1 gene gene 240389 Mar 31 12:08 .emc.index.ids These 2 files have been nuked to see if a rebuild fixes it, no. And now everthing kmail, about 8 packages, has been re-installed from the local archive since the mirror is missing now for several days. Is there a fix? Or can it be fixed short of installing a stretch netinstall on a new drive? Cheers, Gene Heskett -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>