Random email disappears from my sent box in mac mail

Question

I use mac mail and this is a problem I've had for a while.  I had it on my old macbook pro and on the one I've had for a couple of months.  I use ATT and I notice that occasionally emails will disappear from my "sent" box.  Sometimes if I close out of mac mail and reopen it will show up, other times the sent mail will not appear.
I am now trying to find an important mail I sent this afternoon and cannot.  I tried going to mailbox and clicked on "rebuild".  All the mail in my "in box" disappeared and appears to be doing something but the sent folder is in tact and the missing email is still missing.
I have researched this and it seems that this problem goes back years.  When I used Mac Outlook, I never had problems with mail disappearing.  I had other problems, though, like my mail refreshing and re-downloading all the saved mail on the server which is why I switched to Mac Mail.  I think I rather have hundreds of du much mail than randomly disappearing email.  Geez, is it that hard to get a decent Mac mail client that I dunno, um works???

Answer 1

Select the Accounts tab in the preference dialog, then select the affected account in the list on the left.
In the Account Information pane, select the correct server in the menu labeled
Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP)
If there's only one server in the menu, select
Edit SMTP Server List...
and add a new server with the correct settings. If you're not sure how to do that, try the Mail Setup Assistant.