The problem is that traditionally it’s been pretty difficult to make OS X’s Mail.app play well enough with Exchange to be a viable replacement. For my personal use case there were a few things that always held me back:

• The default view settings are not conducive to effectively manage a lot of email.
• No keyboard shortcuts to move messages into folders.
• All other email programs display the default system font when it receives an email generated in Mail.app — in Office for Windows this is Times New Roman.

I think I’ve finally addressed these issues enough to make Mail.app my primary mail application and ditch the horrors of Outlook. But you’ll need a few settings and plugins to get that done.

View options

I like the simple, friendly list view that these options give me. Try it out:

Shortcuts for moving messages

Mail Act-On 3 is an essential extension. It does a bunch of different things, but for the best feature is that you can map a key to moving messages to a different folder (I use “v” to match Gmail’s shortcuts), and then use type-ahead to pick the right folder:

Changing the default font

Universal Mailer is another powerful plugin that just makes Mail.app work better, but its best features is that you can set a system font that is respected by other email programs:

Unexpected bonus features

Switching to mail brings a bunch of great things with it that you don’t get in Outlook:

• Smart folders that can bring a bunch of different emails together based on specific criteria you set.
• Great integration with iOS, since it takes advantage of handoff.
• Fast email that’s not ugly.

All I’m saying is, give it a try. Your eyes will thank you.