Mail problems

*bangs head against wall*

I have been a Mac bigot for years and years and years, but ever since they went to OS X it's gotten harder and harder to stay one. Can someone please help me here before I throw this machine through the window?

This time it's Apple's Mail.

1) Is there any way to turn off the indexing feature? I really don't need it to index my 800 spam messages, especially since it does it while I'm trying to scan for false positives and whenever it finishes it throws me back to the top of the list. And then does it again two minutes later. I don't even use the search feature in my real-mail folders.

2) My accounts are set to automatically delete trash mail that's over a day old -- but it has never deleted the trash, ever. I always have to do it manually. ???

3) It's fortunate that I don't send a lot of mail, because about a third of the time that I do, the message seems to go through fine. Vanishes from the box and all. Then, the next time I boot up (I don't have air conditioning and our power grid sucks, so no, I'm not going to leave it on all the time), I get an alert saying the message didn't go through because the server couldn't deliver it. At least one person has told me that they got duplicates when I let it retry the send, so apparently it is working the first time.

4) Is there any way at all to make it show the e-mail addresses, not just the identities, in the column headers? It's not one of the options, but I thought I'd ask anyway.

I'm definitely going back to Entourage in a few months, but I'd like to maintain my sanity until then.