Further commentary: this looks like it may be an aegypten problem, and not directly in kmail -- I see this issue being specifically tracked in the aegypten-II bugtracker (lost the URL, sorry).
Furthermore, the S/MIME howto no longer works properly -- the codebases in that howto require a version of libassuan not currently in debian (even unstable) requiring a manual build of (now) 3 packages (libassuan, libksba, and gnupg-1.9.x) to make this work. This makes Kmail crypto in Debian increasingly unworkable. I've not seen any ITPs for gnupg-1.9.x (or at least the gpg-agent part of the package) recently, which would push towards resolving this issue. Whether or not packaging "beta code" would be a Good Idea is something that might want to be addressed. Managing this issue for people who can't or don't want to use gpg-agent as part of their crypto setup should probably be strong addressed with the (Kmail upstream), as well as their wish to force downstream users to use beta/non-production code from a utility that they require. Personally, for me as a user, this kind of a bug would be a show-stopper in a heavy production environment. Having to rebuild 3 packages to get properly functioning crypto in my MUA is absolutely unacceptable. Likewise is having to use a development code base for a security-sensitive application like GnuPG.
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