Using Mail on Lion as an Exchange Client

Hi everyone. I'm in the process of moving from using Outlook to Mail as my Exchange client. The experience is going so badly that I'm confident I must be missing something because, frankly, if what I'm seeing of Mail is it at its best the application would have been discontinued long ago.

The issues I'm seeing so far are:

1) There's a huge lag between when Exchange is receiving e-mail and when it appears in Mail. I just tested this by sending an e-mail from another account, using Thunderbird, to my Exchange account. My iPhone got it within seconds, Outlook running on my Mac a second or two later - 10 minutes or so later it's still not in my inbox. In the interim I've seen seemingly random activity in the "MAIL ACTIVITY" pane but no new email has arrived.

2) It doesn't seem that deleting a message in Mail deletes it from Exchange - at least not right away.

3) My inbox is repeatedly completely blank

That said I'm confident that Mail isn't what I'm experiencing. I just need to know how to make this better.

Thanks.

 

After I posted this I developed the hunch that my having it on a one minute refresh was actually the problem - that since my initial setup was taking more than a minute it was just colliding with itself. So for the time being I have it set to only check manually. I also found the Activity popup which at least lets me now understand what the seemingly random entries under MAIL ACTIVITY are about - understandably it's catching up on years of sent mail and trash.

I figure I'll let it finish doing that and then try it back on the 1 minute poling interval.