Staus KMail/Akonadi POP3/SMTP support

Hello all,

first of all, let me say a big *thank you* for KMail and KNode, I use 
these two programs since about eight years and never regretted it.

I am on a Gentoo ~amd64 notebook and I use Qt 4.6 live from the qting-
edge-overlay and KDE4 live from the kde-overlay and had almost no 
problems using them since the KDE4-alpha days back then.

Currently I update "around" the KDE-PIM-Module (last update yesterday), 
because of the transition of KMail to Akonadi, sometimes I update 
akonadi-server and libkdepim (or kdepimlibs - don't remember exactly) 
and KMail as of mid-January still keeps functioning.

But since I had to switch from KNode to that slow, memory-consuming 
monster, that is Thunderbird (because KNode had stopped working with 
leafnode around December for whatever reason - if I find some time, I 
might send a mail or to about this problem as well), I think it might be 
time for me trying out Akonadi for mail and news.

From what I understand, this is most likely a one-way-road, so - in 
order to decide, whether or not that time has come - I need answers (or 
pointers to answers) for the following questions:

  a) I am using POP3 and SMTP for retrieving or sending eMail (possibly 
secured via SSL/TLS). Are those protocols already supported well enough 
in Akonadi?

  b) Is KMail2 currently in a working state? I don't mind a crash 
sometimes, but the basic things should work: Reading Mails, sending 
mails and so on.

  c) Does NNTP work and is KNode ported? For my News-consumption I now 
use (see above) Thunderbird and I like to switch back to KNode ASAP, 
but...

  d) How do I upgrade? I know, that there must be the KMailCVT(?)-
Program, but does it work for my setup or should I do it manually (how)?

Reading the Techbase/Userbase/ML/Blog-articles I get the impression, 
that IMAP will work (and get converted) but POP3/SMTP is not 
automatically converted and might be unstable.

Having said/asked this, what are the opinions of the PIM-developers?
If the answer is s.th. like "Do an upgrade and you will know, what hell 
feels like!" I ask you to write a short article (hopefully distributed 
via planetkde or the dot) when KMail has become usable again for the 
most usual use-cases, so that people could give it a try without having 
to worry about their mails.

Again: Thank you!

  Benjamin