I found a nice little Mail plugin that almost satisfies my needs. It’s called Letterbox and is downloadable from http://harnly.net/software/letterbox/. My only gripe – and its probably something Letterbox doesn’t have much control over – is that the layout of the ‘fields’ shown in the middle column don’t work perfect for the 3 column layout. Ideally the way Apple lays out the fields in the middle column should be replaced by how the fields are laid out in Outlook with the date, size etc being shown as sub-text below the from and the subject.

Still works great!