Mail appears to be send - but isn't

Hopefully somebody can help figure this out - because it's driving me nuts:
I use Mail - and in my job I often sends mails with a lot of recipients. But Mail is playing games with me. Most of the time I send and receive OK, but from time to time mails disapears.
Two examples:
When somebody sends me a mail (and I know its coming), I don't get it - and the sender doesn't get an error mail.
When I send out emails, they move to the send folder - but they aren't send.
What can I do to make sure this doesn't happen? It's really a big problem.
Thanks in advance,
Anita
PowerBook G4 12"   Mac OS X (10.4.7)   Mail 2.1

If this email account is provided by your ISP or by your web domain hosting company, you need to contact the email account provider for this account.
If someone sends you a message and you don't receive it with the Mail.app, have you checked the account via webmail access (if available) using a browser to confirm if the missing message is available on the server but not downloaded by Mail?
If not available on the server either, this is not a Mail.app problem.
If a message cannot be successfully sent by the Mail.app for whatever reason, it will remain in the Outbox mailbox. A message moved to the account's Sent mailbox indicates the message was sent.
Open one of these sent messages not received by the recipient. At the menu bar, go to View > Message and select Long Headers.
If there is text - including a mix of numbers and letters next to Message ID, this is additional proof the message was sent. When contacting your ISP or email account provider for your email account, you need to provide them the Message ID for any sent message reported as not being received by the recipient. Your ISP or email account provider for your email account should be able to trace the message with the Message ID for the message to determine if it was delivered to the recipient's incoming mail server.
This doesn't sound like a Mail.app problem to me.

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