Problems in Kmail 1.10.1 on Ubuntu Intrepid

I have used Kmail for a long time and I have generally been very impressed by 
it. However, after a recent upgrade from Ubuntu Hardy to Intrepid and hence 
from Kmail 1.9.3 (based on KDE 3.5.9) to Kmail 1.10.1 (based on KDE 4.1.2) I 
noticed that a number of things stopped working which made me prefer Kmail 
over other clients in the first place:

1. Expansion in kmailrc
In my kmailrc configuration file I use expansions like:

check-interval[$ie]=$(/home/andre/bin/test-online)

The script "test-online" returns 0 if I'm not on-line (in a train or so) and a 
value of 10 otherwise. This prevents interval mail checking if I am not on-
line and checks mail every 10 minutes if I am. In Kmail 1.10.1, however, this 
expansion stopped working. I did discover that a similar expansion:

default-transport[$ie]=$(/home/andre/bin/test-kmail-smtp)

in the mailtransports file does work, strangely enough.

2. I used to be able to use the "Send Queued Messages Via" menu option to send 
messages stored in my outbox via a smtp server of choice. This does not appear 
to work any longer in Kmail 1.10.1. It seems as if a message is already 
assigned to a particular smtp server when it ends up in the outbox. 

Does anybody have these same experiences and found out whether there are work-
arounds? Or are these features of Kmail that have been discarded (a pity as I 
liked Kmail especially for these kind of features).

Regards,
André de Roos