Question about Outlook Express

what is up with the imap server. it CONSTANTLY times out and SUCKS. important mail doesn't come through on my mac and when it does it's intermittent. Or it takes forever to send an email and the server is constantly downloading messages and now i'm getting tons of SPAM. WHY IS THIS SO HARD TO IMPLEMENT MICROSOFT. One more week and i'm dumping all of these accounts and going back to gmail. This is ridiculous.