Lion Mail stops receiving

I apologize if this was posted before. I did not find anything like this.

We have a group of users (myself included) that all upgraded to Lion. Six of us have the same hardware (MBP current model), we'll call MBPC, 1 a MBA (last model), 1 a MBP (the Core i5 series, we'll call MBP5) and the last one a MBP (Core 2 Due series, we'll call MBP2).

The MBA, MBP5 and one of the MBPC had the same issue with Mail. None of the rest of us have experienced this and now only the MBP5 is still experiencing it.

We are all on the same WiFi network. The MBP5 does not get an error message, and the user can send emails with no problem. Another team mate will mention an email they sent to him that he did not get. He quits mail and restarts it and there's the email. Sometimes an hour old. His mail is set to check every minute.

These clients are connecting to an Exchange 2007 server. I have rebuilt the mailbox and it will fix it for a few days. I even wiped the "account" in Mail (his only account) and rebuilt and again it worked for a few days. However, it's not a perm fix.

I don't know what else to do. I am the "Mac expert" at my company, which means I was deemed responsible for all the Macs, however I have no experience with Macs (prior to getting one myself) and have figured out what I can on my own, so I apologize if I don't understand a suggestion someone may make, especially if you start talking about plists and file structures.

Any luck with this? Exact same scenario, except that some of our users are on Snow Leopard too.

Sort-of. On the MBP5 I changed Mail from the standard Exchange to IMAP. This seems to have corrected the issue. You would have to turn on IMAP on the Exchange server, but our network admin had already done that. I noticed that IMAP is also how Thunderbird connects, so I tested Thunderbird (with Lightning add-on) to get mail and calendars, and the Provider for Microsoft Exchange 0.17 add-on). That said, Thunderbird isn't any better, but an option to check out.

So, try IMAP and maybe you'll avoid this issue also.

I get this on a fairly regular basis since Lion. I see on my iPhone (connected via IMAP) that I'm receiving emails, but my Lion iMac with Mail via Exchange doesn't get any. I then have to quit Mail which usually doesn't work. Mail just doesn't shut down and I have to force quit. I then restart Mail and it receives all those emails again. This happens about 1-2 times a week on my work machine.

I guess this is a bug with Exchange in Lion Mail - not great, but I can live with it and hope an update fixes it at some point.