kmail vs gmail problem

Greetings; Twice in the last 2 weeks I have been forced to reboot the machine, as it had a locked up, unkillable session of kmail showing in htop. I had hit the list reply button, only to be greeted by the spinning dumbell mouse cursor, which would spin forever. The machine was NOT stuck in a loop someplace burning up cpu's, nothing, not even kmail was showing any great cpu activity, but the process itself was unkillable. This time I was attempting to teach Bret Busby how to construct a sig separator, the \r-- \r sequence and it was one of his reply messages I was reading & tried to reply to when it locked up. This reboot took around 30 minutes because /amandatapes-1T, a terabyte drive, had not been fsck'd in 181 days, and fscking a terabyte drive, even if no errors other than severe fragmentation (62%) exist is a 30 to 45 minute process. Amanda, the backup program, /thinks/ the drive is a 30 tape, changer equiped library. (except its 10,0000% more dependable that such a mechanical monster would be, and 2% of the cost) I'd hate to think how long it will take to do a 2 terabyte drive as there is now 4 of them here at the Heskett mini-ranchette. Its difficult to buy anything smaller. I deleted the last 4 messages from him from ~/Mail/kubuntu-users/cur before I restarted kmail, knowing I'd be going thru the same hung machine procedure if I didn't. Last time I made 3 reboots trying, and finally just cleaned out the folder (a different one) before trying a 4th reboot & kmail restart. That, like this, complained about the index file being corrupted on the launch of kmail but normal operation was able to be resumed. Has anyone a clue just what gmail is doing now? Or how to fix kmail so it tolerates a message posted from their (IMNSHO) busted webmail app? This is R14.0.0.2 I believe. Last updated from Slavics? server a day back. Looks like I'll need to reboot again, I have a net caused ooops in the log, and my local network is dead although I can ping yahell. 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>