Kmail indexing killed my pc :)

Lately I've worked a lot on my email folders, reorganizing them, converting 
old stuff from maildir to mbox format for archival purposes etc.
I also had to correct a few maildir problems on the server (which I 
administer) so in the end I just wiped the dIMAP account on my laptop and 
rebuilt it.
The rebuild process was a slow and painful one, with kmail constantly doing a 
lot of disk i/o. Then the rebuild process finished, but kmail was still doing 
an awful lot of i/o, to the point of being almost unresponsive and slowing my 
laptop to a crawl. I left the pc sitting there for quite e few hours and when 
I came back it seemed it had finished whatever it was doing. Then after a few 
clicks it was all over again: several hours of heavy i/o, disk read in 
particular.
I spent some time with lsof iotop and the like and I've come to a conclusion: 
kmail was rebuilding the indexes for the big folders I had migrated the day 
before.
I suppose the devs were positive that it should be doable in background as a 
low priority task, but in my case it was a major hindrance. What drove me 
crazy was the fact that I didn't know what it was doing, the reindexing didn't 
even start right after I had finished handling those folders, it begun later 
for no apparent reason and lasted for a whole day.
Hence my question: should this kind of task be listed in the task list, in the 
bottom right corner of the program? At least it would be obvious why things 
are happening, even if I could not stop it from happening. Maybe the user 
should be able to pause indexing? I hope this kind of problem will be 
addressed with the switch to nepomuk/akonadi.

--
The Fibonacci in Lateralus: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wS7CZIJVxFY