Several days ago I upgraded to kde 4.6.4. This "upgrade" included the new kmail and the problems started soon after. First off my messages were not imported forcing me to do it manually. The process took several hours resulting in a slow, sluggish, and unusable kmail. Add to this the 18 akonadi related entries in the running processes. I find the new kontact suite too invasive, resource wasting, and unstable. It's not like kmail is overloaded. I have around 6k messages in various categories and six email accounts. After using kmail for several years I now find myself forced to seek an alternative. I liked the features in kmail but since problems like this are apparently a low priority it looks like I'll be switching to thunderbird and will figure out how to remove akonadi, nepomuk, kde pim, and the kontact suite without making kde unusable.

The decision to upgrade you to KDE PIM 4.6 was taken by your distribution.
The email import was supposed to be automated however. 18 processes running also seems a touch excessive, even for 6 email accounts. Make sure that you don't have duplicated accounts present in your Akonadi configuration.

Actually email import is supposed to be deactivated, only accounts and their folder struture should be processed.

The only message processing that should happen is checking DIMAP accounts for messages which have not been uploaded yet and messages in IMAP/DIMAP accounts with tags.

Do you think you could post (or send as PM) your migrator log? (sould be in $HOME/.kde/share/apps/kmail-migrator)

Cheers,
_