Lovin my MacBook! (I never thought that I’d say those words – I thought it was all hype, but it is not; it is just what you are use to). When I purchases an airport extreme and set it up in less than 10 minutes; including printing wirelessly and streaming music wirelessly, I was even more sold! Yahhhhhooooo! I love it!

WIChemEngr

You can use rules to only keep email (in Apple Mail) from a certain time period. I have rules set up to archive anything more than 6 months old, so my inbox (and the server space I occupy) stay reasonably clean.

And this is on exchange, by the way. I almost completely disagree with the author here. Before Snow leopard, we were force to use Entourage for all things Exchange… which is “pretty,” but not very pleasant to use. The coolest thing about it were it’s project management features, which we didn’t use because our department uses tools that perform that task much better that Entourage ever will. Besides that, it is slow, bloated, and unreliable; on many occasions I’ve had it stop syncing and unable to connect to the Exchange server, until it refused to work at all and I had to just give up on it and revert to accessing my Exchange mail via web browser. When it id work, search was piss-poor, I had to jump through hoops to remove emails that I didn’t want added to my address book, and it would lag and stall at random for minutes at a time.

Mail on Snow Leopard is all I need. I’m glad that mail, calendars, and the address book are split into separate apps. There is no reason to cram it all into one app and bloat it to no end. I regularly send email attachments (either multiple or one at a time) that weigh in at more than 10MB (though I probably shouldn’t email files of that size), and have had no problems. I suggest you check with you IT administrator regarding your problems sending attachments. Like I mentioned to cschep, I have a slew of rules that handles mail from multiple accounts (so that I can view all of my inboxes together and tell their constituent emails apart from one another), rules that move certain emails to other locations based on specific criteria, and rules that handle spam that the filters don’t catch, among other things. I also really appreciate the ability to view my email as threads.

As far as email attachments showing up in random places in an email, all you have to do is go to Edit > Attachments and you can set the option to always insert attachments at the end of your messages. You can also set this on a per email basis.

Syncing speed is not a problem here either. In the Mail preferences, you can set the interval at which you want Mail to check for email (anywhere between a minute or an hour, or manually). I have an iPhone that is connected to the same exchange server ((the iPhone uses push notifications to get Exchange mail), and typically when I get a mail notification on my iPhone, Mail gets the same email(s) seconds later at the most, if not simultaneously. It receives mail fast, and sends mail fast.

iCal/Exchange calendar integration handles all of my needs. Meeting invitations reliably show up in both Mail and iCal, and I can accept/decline right from mail or iCal. I’ve had no problems here so far. One feature that I would like to see here is the ability to reserve conference rooms in a meeting invitation, which, oddly enough, Entourage can’t do but Outlook does. I also agree with Arne about accessing public folders, which should be included.

Someone else already addressed the Address Book topics. It is trivial to create groups (static or smart groups), add custom fields, and search your local address book database or the Exchange server (lightning fast, might I add) for any contact info. This functionality is extended to *any* application that ties in to the Address Book framework.

There are definitely some features that Entourage/Outlook has that Mail could use, but it isn’t missing anything that I absolutely need in order to make use of it. And what it does do, I have to say it blows Entourage out of the water. It is a much more usable, unobtrusive application.

The key aspect is, that Apple actively states exactly the Exchange integration time and again as one of Snow Leopards biggest enhancements.

It is not unless it works. And it doesn’t.

I also came here via HN, but I wanted to rail against this link bait, scream it down for the IT support nightmare that is Exchange and Entourage, but really, the link above cuts the emotion and speaks straight to the facts:
both sides can debate over debate-able points like “better”. What works in real-world experience and after users have 30GBs of mail, and filing bug reports and waiting for support, that’s a valuable thing to discuss as well. Mr. Anderson is closer to a path I can benefit from following, and your readers may feel the same way.

“When a message contains elements that are not plain US-ASCII text, the elements must be encoded. When dealing with such non-text content, including attachments, MIME is used for encoding. Both Exchange 2007 and earlier versions of Exchange Server use the Base64 algorithm to encode attachments. And the disadvantage of Base64 is that it bloats attachments by 33%.” – http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2009.01.exchangeqa.aspx?pr=blog

Other than that I agree about the short comings in Mail and iCal.

I’m on snow leopard.