Hello Steve,
Kmail 1.7.1 is the latest stable version and the bug (if its been taken care of) should not appear in it.
Regarding apt-get upgrade, its often seen that due to lack of some remote dependancy of a base package of KDE, its pretty probable that Apt decides not to upgrade any KDE application. Of Course this is my personal opinion, and till someone backs me up it will remain only my opinion
Yet I have had trouble to upgrade kde simply by apt-get
Anyways.. before upgrade really does anything, it spews out the list of packages "held back", "to be removed" and "to be upgraded". So you know whats finally going to be installed.
Check this out
http://www.hants.lug.org.uk/cgi-bin/...nts/DebianTips
Hope that helps
Valerie