MAC email woes - best option for exchange?

I am tearing my hair out trying to find a decent mail program to work with MS Exchange. So far I seem to have had nothing but trouble:

- MAC Mail 'works' quite well but many colleagues tell me that my mails never arrive, hence the thought of losing what are usually important mails scares the heck out of me.

- Entourage works OK but is slow and worse than that synchronization is awful. I can have an empty mailbox (very rare) yet log onto the server from outlook on another PC or via webmail to find that all of the emails i have 'filed' are in fact still in the inbox.

The very reason I am posting this is that my Entourage inbox and server inbox are out of sync by a couple of hundred mails and I am sick of having to force a manual sync in Entourage or log onto web mail to re-file mails.

i have tried to install the updated version of Entourage which uses the Webmail synchronization method but cannot install it (I get an error saying that my version is not supported). I really don't want to have to buy another copy of Entourage.

Any thoughts? Any alternatives?

The topic of email applications crops up regularly, and the two that most people 'vote' for are Mail and Thunderbird.

I prefer and use Eudora, which will work with Exchange, but Eudora is old hat now and doesn't render html very well - it was never meant to.